The 29th International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent societies just has agreed to incorporated the emblem of the Red Crystal as a new symbol of protection for war victims and humanitarian workers. The new emblem won’t replace the old emblems, but can be used by countries who don’t want to use the other two symbols, which are supposed by certain people as having a religious connotation.
So the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement has accepted the Palestine Red Crescent Society and the Israeli Magen David Adom (Star of David) into their rangs, the latter can now include into the crystal their sign of the double triangle. Hopefully the belligerent parties all over the globe also accept the humanitarian message of rescue and help – often nowadays these are groups not respecting much of common values.
The message of the new emblem as a symbol of neutrality is interesting from the view of the wisdom teachings: a square stands for matter, standing on the top the rhombus is overcoming the heaviness of matter – if you look at it, it feels upward directed and lighter than the square – and a crystal also stands for matter purified. The cross is an ancient symbol of man fixed into matter, even from pre-Christian eras, like the Eastern Cosmic Man, the Purusha, fixed onto the cross of matter.
In the emblem we use with the Circle of Good Will and which you see on the top of the blog page – the upright square encircling a cross and encircled by a circle – the circle symbolises eternity, into which the material creation is manifested and hold – all the parts being integrated into a greater whole. May the message of synthesis and universality of good will also inspire the good will workers working under the signs of the red cross, red crescent and red crystal.

On June 19th the United Nations inaugurated the new Human Rights Council at the Geneva Headquarters. To remind of the 19th Article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers“, the Swiss watchmaker Swatch launched a “Human Rights Watch” in UN-blue, the Swiss federal minister Micheline Calmy-Rey proudly showed it. May it be used in the double sense of the word “watch” – a real Human Rights Watch.
Hopefully the new council becomes an effective instrument of furthering the human rights and not degrade it to a discussion forum for the interests of particulars. The “superpower” USA however felt their concerns (or power?) not represented enough in the new council, so they preferred to stay apart – as with many other international concerns.
The United Nations do an incredible job in so many fields of life, without this institution the state of the world would be defitinely worse.
For groups supporting the UN from a spiritual side you might read this blog entry.

Sommer solstice today! In the annual rhythm nature is at its full bloom here in the northern hemisphere, and from now on will go again back. Everything in creation is living with bigger or smaller cycles of manifestation and dissolution. The seeds of one cycle are preserved for the next one, like shown the story of Noah’s ark or of Vaivasvatha Manu in the east, who collects the seeds of life for the next creation.
This seems to be the inspiration of the Global Crop Security Trust, whose mission is it “to ensure the conservation and availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide. The fight against hunger is one of the greatest challenges facing the world over the coming decades. Crop diversity is fundamental to defeating hunger and achieving food security. But it is at serious risk. An increasingly unpredictable and changing climate, and a world population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, will place unprecedented demands on agriculture. Conserving the vast diversity of crop varieties is the only way to guarantee that farmers and plant breeders will have the raw materials needed to improve and adapt their crops to meet these challenges – and provide food for us into the future.”
As the press told yesterday, they have just startet building a vault dug into a frozen mountain deep in an Arctic island’s permafrost, which will serve as a Noah’s ark for world seeds in case of a global catastrophe. Premiers of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland were attending the cornerstone ceremony near Longyearbyen, a town in Norway’s Svalbard Islands, about 620 miles from the North Pole. The seeds, packaged in foil, would be stored at such temperatures that they could last hundreds, even thousands, of years.
If the grass seeds sold by clever German business men to football friends as “Hallowed Ground” – a box of the standardised seeds used for the football grounds of the world cup – will also be included in the northern ark was not reported by the press…

At work I heard yesterday afternoon a chorus of horn sounding over the city of Berne. A quick look into the internet showed the reason: Switzerland had won 2:0 over Togo at the Football World Championship. Football seems to be the only occasion where emotions are publicly going high in this country where showing emotions is not seen as a virtue. Already since the beginning of the championship a big poster is decorating the Bundeshaus, the Swiss House of Parliament, (which is wrapped in the moment because of renovation) humorously saying “Foodball is governing”.
On my way home there were a lot of hooting cars where people were holding Swiss flags out of the window. Over the place in front of the Bundeshaus there was a a cloud from fireworks and below a dancing and shouting reddish-white mass, and the colour-symphony went over to the red traffic busses, which were stopped by dancers with football shirts in the national colors. They were also tapping on passing-by cars. With my motor-bike I drove on the pavement in front of the Bundeshaus and thus wavingly escaped the commotion.
I had to smile. It was such a beautiful picture of childlike hilarity, which is so easily passing over to the opposite at the next occasion. It was like a symbol of man under the swing of emotions, keeping him in sway over a long part of his spiritual path. (“Man” also includes woman – or better: “wo-man” includes man, since the word comes from Sanskrit “Manushya”, meaning the mind-endowed being. However the masses of fans were mainly male…)
Man is caught in the pairs of opposites (: and football is a play of opposites par excellence, a beautiful example of the play of human life). Until man gains the bliss of the inner equilibrium the quickly changes of happiness and depression hold him in sway.

After a few hours at the computer – working for next month’s Lunar Messenger, on the Devas, the subtle intelligences, see the note about the booklet “Cooperation between the Human and Deva Kingdom” by. E. Krishnamacharya – we went for a short swim in a nearby river. The clouds were already dark, announcing an approaching thunderstorm, when my son and I jumped into the fast flowing waves – a wonderfull feeling. The air was full of leaves chased by the wind. Water is such a great purifyer, and swimming in fresh water gives you an increadibly feeling of energy.
When we came out, the first drops were already falling, and a few minutes later the full rain broke out. Many people took shelter at the buildings of the river bath. You virtually could feel the electricity of the subtle intelligences chasing in commotion through the sky. Lightnings flashing gave release to the tension, and the rain calmed it even more. An Australian neighbor invited us to bring us back home in his car. After a short sprint to the parking we were back into the dry.
Water, thunderstorm, freshness, energy, electricity in the air – we experience all these phenomena not as scientific processes, but as totalities of impressions. The totality hides the individual components, and hidden in the components described by science there are intelligences at work, which arrange the totalities of the different levels – thus you can experience the devas at work.

Football tickles national emotions, more than any other sport, sometimes even up to violence. The Red Cross however is known for the neutrality of their help. With a wink the German Red Cross made a poster for an ad-campaign on the occasion of the Football World Championship. It shows a sanitary man in the Dutch fan corner of a football stadium helping a Dutch fan, with the slogan “Für jeden im Einsatz” (Serving everybody).
The Dutch Red Cross retorted this campaign with a poster of their own, showing two sanitary men carrying a German football player from the field, with the slogan: “Het Rode Kruis helpt echt iedereen” (the Red Cross is helping really everybody)…
For the German Red Cross the Football World Championship is a great challenge, with hundreds of people in service. If you are interested in the spiritual value of service, you might read this.

Bill Gates, since 12 years the richest man of the world and co-founder of Microsoft, announced two days ago that from 2008 on he is planning to withdraw from day-to-tay business in the company to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – an important step in his life.
Over years Bill Gates had a tough work schedule, as he recently described in an interview to Fortune.
Bill Gates is also the most generous philanthropist of the world, and his foundation has more than 29 billion dollars for their projects. He is also planning to give away 90 – 95 per cent of his total wealth to welfare projects before he dies.
This demonstrates that if we put money to a positive use, we can do much good and can also be active on a larger scale and on wider fields. Without the necessary means you cannot work in this measure.
Money needs to circulate. Like with breathing, you cannot just take in without giving out. If you use the money for good will, it is helping you to overcome egoistic tendencies and to step on on the path.

From time to time in my life I had come into contact with persons with psychic difficulties. For over 10 years I had been working with refugees and migrants, partly as head of a psycho-social counseling centre, where I saw the effects of flight, torture or disturbed social and family relations. Also on my spiritual path there had been encounters with persons whose inner balance was disturbed for a time, and over 20 years ago a friend of mine had committed suicide out of a state of confusion, mixed with spiritual concepts. And there was a recent encounter with someone who, through an imbalance in life was irritating a group. It is not easy handling such situations, where an entire system is touched, and the gradations from normalcy to borderline and medical situations are often not obvious.
Two weeks ago I had a talk about such problems with my spiritual teacher, Dr. Kumar, whom I had observed how he dealt with it in a very attentive way. He explained that often medical people also don’t know how to handle such cases, where often fear and irritation in a person is causing agitation, and where psycho-pharmaca seem to be the only way to “slow down”.
Furthering inner and outer silence for calming down the emotional waves is helpful, also homeopathy can be of use, however it has to be adapted to the individual situation. Especially the use of silver, related spiritually with the emotional world, can have a stabilising effect. Dr. Kumar also recommended dietary aspects such as using milk and yogurt, since milk, in an untreated form, has subtle smoothing effects not yet medically recognised. A rhythmical living as well as a loving, understanding attention from the people in the surrounding might be of help, stigmatising is not.

In yesterday’s issue of the Neue Züricher Zeitung (New Zurich Newspaper) there was an article about a management forum on “Leadership and Health”, which targeted at sensitising� executives to the consequences of the big social problem of work load and stress. The tenor was that it is not enough to do some jogging or relaxation exercises or to distribute fruits to the employees to promote health. This is just fighting the symptoms. A holistic approach includes developing an awareness of the unsatisfied needs of what is really good for the individual and the social system.
Many are suffering from not having a right to say, of missing possibilities of development and of fear of losing one’s job – much more than of the work load. Creating an awareness in the management is seen as a first step for health prevention. The 13th century theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas already said: “Health is less a state than an attitude and thrives with the zest for life.” You might also see in this context the booklet of Dr. Kumar on “Spirituality in Business and Management“.
For furthering the joie de vivre, the vitality, and at the same time staying balanced you have to be connected with the source of life force. Therefore a holistic approach to solving these problems of work life and helve absolutely needs to include the spiritual dimension.

Over the weekend we had participated in a seminar of our spiritual teacher Dr. K. Parvathi Kumar in Amettla, some 60 km south of Tarragona. He deepened several topics about the spiritual significance of numbers into which he had delved during the seminar in Samos about the wisdom teachings of Pythagoras 2 weeks ago. It was again fascinating to see the relations between numbers, rhythms and time cycles. The numbers 1 – 9 are not just a linear numerical sequence, but contain the seeds of the structures of the subjective and objective creation – seeds of wisdom to ponder upon.
About 200 group members mainly from Spain had gathered for the seminar. The sunday morning fire ritual on the beach was a special highlight. Before the start a fiery object (it probably wasn’t a meteorit because of the kind of direction) flew for some seconds silently and in high speed in a horizontal line over the ocean before disappearing again. The sun coming slowly up over the horizon, the waves’ rhythmic movement and the flames of the fire, together with the mantric songs, created an unforgettable ambience, which uplifted all those witnessing it with an open heart and mind.