In last Fridays’s issue of the NZZ (New Zurich Newspaper) there was an article about the computer technology of the ancient Greeks. It was reporting about a mechanism found in 1901 by sponge divers near the Greek island of Antikythera, thus called the Antikythera mechanism. It has puzzled and intrigued historians of science and technology since its discovery. Already in the 50th of last century a scientist put up the theory that the Antikythera mechanism was a device for calculating the motions of stars and planets, which would make the device the first known analog computer. It dates from around the 1st century B.C. and is the most sophisticated mechanism known from the ancient world. Nothing as complex is known for the next thousand years. It is even possible that the mechanism is based on heliocentric principles, rather than the then-dominant geocentric view espoused by Aristotle and others.
Recent X- and gamma ray researches showed an astonishing precision of the device and subtle inscriptions. Latest discoveries are reported on the website of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project. In November 06 there will be a conference in Athens to present the results.
The wisdom teachings tell that for long times there has been a connection between Greece and the East, and there were people having an outstanding knowledge of numbers and cosmology (see the blog-entry about the wisdom of Pythagoras). We always think we are at the pinnacle of knowledge, but we have to bow down to the heights of the gigants of the past.

Last Friday I was at the Annual Assembly of the Swiss Red Cross (SRC), in commemoration of the 140th anniversary of the SRC, hold in the town hall of the city of Berne. The subject of the assembly was the role of volunteer work.
After a talk of the Swiss federal minister of finance, Hans-Rudolf Merz about the indispensability of volunteer work in today’s society, there was an interesting presentation of futurist Georges T. Roos of ROOS Office for Cultural Innovation, a private futures studies institute in Lucerne and member of the World Future Society. He spoke about “Does Volunteer Work have a Future? – What will move people tomorrow”. He sees individualisation as the central trend, that everyone is looking to his own “salvation”, and there is no more a higher sense generally obliging. Central values are, everything has to be easy and convenient, with mobility in all aspects of life. At the same time many people want to make a difference and stand up for bettering the world – they want to do good deeds, because it gives you fun and experiences and you meet people.
Subjectively people have much less time for volunteer work, there is a competition with sport, entertainment, friends and family. However, there are new kinds of recognition. Volunteer work gives you experiences you cannot buy with money and enables you to have a growth of self-awareness. You find the presentation (in German) on kultinno.ch.

On a genuine spiritual path volunteer work for the benefit of others is of great importance, together with meditation and study of spiritual texts. Without serving others or life in general, you cannot progress. (Have a look at Good Will in Action on The Value of Service.)
From a spiritual point of view a major future trend is the development of group consciousness through service. It helps overcoming the excessive individualism and integrates you into a greater whole. Working together as a group creates a flow of energy uplifting and inspiring all.

The sun is shining bright over the fields here, but in the atmosphere one can sense already that the annual solstice climax has passed by and the sun has started its southern journey again. Yesterday was St. John’s Day, the Christian substitution for the old solsticial celebrations of midsummer. However, there is a deep sense in having St. John’s day at this date of the days starting to decrease: On the opposite side, at winter solstice, the news birth of light, of the saviour is celebrated, and St. John is called his forerunner.
The time reminds me of the St. John’s celebrations in which I took part as a member of a Steiner school about twenty years ago. After a big fire we used to walk with the elder pupils through the night to a lake and have a swim there in the early morning hours. This time of energy change in nature is very special, called the time of the crab’s sidewise movement in spiritual astrology, where at the beginning of Cancer the daytime here in the northern hemisphere is at its hight. A good time to be attentive of what is subtly preparing for the nexts months.

Queen Rania of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is an outstanding goodwill worker and a fighter for the rights of women and children. Her website presents her as a very modern and open queen. Under the navigation captions “Children talk, Youth matters, Women empower, Community connect” you see a number of her social activities. 10 days ago she opened the the Global Women’s Action Network for Children Conference in the old city of Petra near the Dead Sea. In the eyes of many muslims the courageous air of the Jordan queen is too radical. She is fighting against child abuse and so-called murders of honour, where women who don’t correspond to the value ideas of their families are killed by a family member, and these are not punished by the courts.
At every possible occasion Queen Rania is helping children and women. She brought several teenagers to the conference to speak about their problems. She ended her talk at the conference quoting the words of anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
You might like to read the article on Woman and Man. of the Lunar Messenger showing from a spiritual perspective the importance of women’s movements and the dangers of a neglect or oppression of woman leading to a terrible imbalance in society.

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.