Yesterday I got an e-mail from a friend telling me that he will lose his job in some months. He is a professor of psychology at a university in the south-west of the United States and had moved there last autumn from another university in the north-east. He already had told me before that the situation was difficult, since part of the collegues, who hadn’t favored his employment had intensely been mobbing against him.
We first had met each other through a contact via the web 2.5 years ago, later we had shared a room at a seminar of our spiritual teacher in India and again met at three occasions in Europe. From the beginning there was a feeling of a deep connection, for we had been walking a very similar spiritual path over many years. It was a feeling of meeting a brother. It is more profound than physical relatives. Spiritual brotherhood comes out of a similarity of inner alignment to the soul, a striving towards the same pole, a convergence of ideas.
This convergence keeps souls together, to my belief and according to the wisdom teachings over lives. It is deeper than superficial emotional or mental affinities. I have experienced that there exist groups of people following the same quality of attunement, sharing similar attitudes towards the inner purpose. The people with whom I experience this kind of connection are physically dispersed over the globe. With the web it is more easy to keep in contact or even co-operate in a project.
My American brother has a lot of skills and resources. I am sure that, though he is no longer the youngest that he will find a good way out of this professional crisis, bringing him to a new field of experience.

My wife is a piano teacher. Yesterday evening she told me that one of her students just had been very fascinated. The student had experienced that she was using different faculties in playing – imagination, hearing, sense of touch – and my wife had explained her how there is an interplay of these. The student was very grateful and told my wife: “You are always giving me so much.” My wife answered: “I give what I have, and in giving it starts flowing. When you keep it to you, the flow is stopped, and also when you just keep on receiving without giving.” And she told me: “It is like a lying 8, the sign of infinity. It keeps in motion, when you give, without expectation to receive something in return. It is an energy circulation.”
In the “Spiritual Psychology” meditations by Dr. Ekkirala Krishnamacharya, one meditation says: “Bliss lies in giving, not in taking…” It is a deep principle and only little understood today. Many are craving for getting and taking – money, power, love, ideas, emotional affection… In this attitude the free flow is absorbed by you. And when you give out of an expectation to get something in return, you get frustrated, when it doesn’t happen and feel burnt out.
Some time ago I had issued a number of the Good Will in Action on Giving and Taking, where you find some more thoughts about it.

The last weeks when I am going to work I come across a series of road works. Shovel excavators are digging up the roads. Even in a park next to my office all the paths are are closed and are being redone.
What about the inner roads? It seems that there is also need for some repair work from time to time. I feel that I am getting sometimes into habits, which, though subtle, need a repair. When there is too much “business” in the mind, the mindfulness for what is essential and what is just a side-road. The last days my wife and I had observed with some friend, who seems to have a so-called heavy load to carry with her family and social situation. However, with a closer look the situation seems to be self-chosen, and there is no will to do repair work with the roads. The wisdom teachings tell us, that from a larger perspective encompassing the soul’s experience over many incarnations all our life situations are self-chosen. I have come across a lot of people who prefer staying in a situation which for me seemed to be unbearable. But at a closer look a change in the style of living appears to cause more fear for them than to remain stuck in their situation.
Let some road repair work go on from time to time

Yesterday a friend from Argentina sent me a link to a yahoo posting showing satellite photos of a partly submerged land-bridge between India and Sri Lanka. A modern proof of an old story?
The great epic Ramayana tells a story the time of which the wisdom teaching locate at the transition time between the Atlantean and the post-Atlantean race, i.e. nearly a million years ago, though modern writers give it a much shorter past or totally doubt the historic autheticity.
A major sequence of the epic tells the story of building a bridge over the ocean between India and Lanka by a group of Vanaras and other mythological beings. From the wisdom teachings I know that the mythological ape-shaped figures of the Vanaras are forms of high beings who, not conditioned by forms, decided to live in these seemingly animal bodies. There are many details in the Ramayana which a so-called scientific thinking would never except as authentic. But maybe there are more research results ahead like those of the satellite photos proving the historic truth of seeming mythologies.
For the symboligy of bridges see also my posting on Building Brigdes.

The noble and straightforward main character of the epic, Sri Rama, is a great example of a man following the path of moral law through all the vicissitudes of life. It has deeply impregnated Eastern thought – but who of our Westerners has ever gone into it? About three weeks ago I finished reading a detailed renarration of the epic, which was fascinating to me, and I have also read with my children a modern Indian comic strips retelling the story. Though they are not much interested in stories, they were enthousiastic about the “action story”, which can easily keep up with modern superman-stories.

Two days ago I got an e-mail from a Canadian friend with a link to an article on an American website called “Death made in America”, with photos of freak embryos allegedly caused by the Americans using uranium weapons in Afghanistan, where an author said he writes he took them during a journey to Afghanistan from Pakistan.
I don’t put a link to that site, for it is not my intention to increase sensational agitation or get into the trap of political propaganda. Some time ago I had seem fake pictures which were circling in European muslim communities about an alleged transformation of a girl into a freak because of her refusal to follow the Quran.
Images can be used and misused. The images of the freak creatures create a sensation of a terrible horror, of unbelievable depths of individuals or groups fighting against people with other beliefs. The wisdom teachings say that here not humans are at work, but demons incarnated in human bodies. This makes sense to me, for a human, humanitarian attitude can never accept causing such deep hurts to others.
There is an intense fight going on on earth between the different ideologies, often fighting in the name of God. It is an increadibly strong glamour, holding in sway millions of people. The wisdom teachings say we are living in the dark age, in certain strata and cycles of consciousness evolution. 12 years ago I translated a book by Dr. E. Krishnamacharya, Man Sacrifice, the German version of it will be published end of this month. In this book events of a time 5000 years ago are reported, which are also mentioned in the ancient Indian Puranas, about the beginning of the dark age, and that freak creatures because of living against the cosmic laws are described. At the same time you see there how to keep inwardly aligned to the divine in spite of all horrors. Not by closing one’s eyes, but by seeing the deeper causes and by attuning to the divine you can transform the evil, at least the one in yourself.

Some days are flowing smooth, some at high speed. Yesterday was a high speed day. Many different items and situations showed up – phone calls, coordination, e-mailing, driving. But just like when driving in a car, the car is running and you are sitting at the wheel and not running on the highway. I felt that I had to keep in the driver’s position and not to let the busy manager-mind take things over so as not to lose the awareness and get into the feeling of activity. The feeling of the busy mind is clouding it. When I remain centered, things keep in a flow, even at high speed. On such days for me it is all the more important to have my periods of silence in the morning and evening meditations. They help me to keep the inner alignment. In such a balance driving at high speed remains joyful. I like such driving.

Yesterday morning I went by car to pick up our eldest son and his computer equipment from a friend’s house, where he had spent the night. They wanted to do online games, but the line was broken. He just had upgraded to a new version of his favorite game Guild Wars, and he is bent on diving into the new dimensions of this virtual world, where a great number of people are participating. When he is gaming, it is just his body sitting in front of the computer, his mind is far away.
He is absorbed for hours, and getting him out for meals or for other things is quite difficult. Where is an individual in such a state? It seems that the mind is linked off from the physical, forgetting its needs. I myself am working very much with the computer, though not gaming, but following my lines of professional or spiritual work. I also experience this state of absorption in a way, and I often ponder on what is happening through the virtual spheres intermingling with the outer physical worlds. There are so many strata of human consciousness and interests reflected in the ocean of bits and bytes. It is like a concretisation of the emotional and the mental plane, being made visible on the screen, showing a spectrum of the mental focus, often circling around the famous triangle of money, sex and crime.
The transitions between the gross outer and the more subtle world of the virtual sphere are floating. Yesterday evening we ha a visit by a couple from a South-East European country, who had come into contact with us via our good-will website. We had a fascinating exchange. The exchange will continue via the digital channels. Where does the outer, where the digital start and end? It is the same with the subtle states of consciousness you experience in meditation. It also acts upon the grosser spheres, when you regularly attune to it. this principle of interchanging the spheres allows you to live in a higher state of consciousness and at the same time be active in an outer activity.

Yesterday evening I finally finished reading the book “Nonviolent Communication – A Language of Life” by Marshall B. Rosenberg. I was fascinated by the very human and compassionate approach towards solving conflicts and towards understanding one’s own real needs and that of others. The method had helped me in handling conflicts with my sons (15/13 yrs), especially with my younger one. (Last week in Berlin, my friends had a mug with a picture of one of the Simpsons saying “The I haven’t done it boy”, reminding me of the many little conflicts about computer sharing or “littering” at home…)

It had taken over 10 years from the first contact with Nonviolent Communication until now: I remember having heart about it when doing the German translation of the book “Spiritual Politics – Changing the World from the Inside Out“, by Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson in 1996 (for which I hadn’t found a publisher however, in spite of intense search). Then I got some insights in 97/98 at a conflict resolution training course of the Swiss Red Cross, where I was at that time head of a psychosocial couseling centre for migrants and refugees.

The book even came to me in 99, when at an international conference in Geneva a participant from Los Angeles gave it to me. My wife later started reading it and was enthusiastic about it, applying the concepts in her dealing with our chidren and neighborhood help. 6 months ago she went to a training of the Centre for Nonviolent Communication in Basel and even organised a course with a CNVC-trainer in a neighbor village. She tried to do it again the last weeks, but two days ago they had to cancel it because of too few registrations.

We had quite some discussions at home about the nonviolent way of dealing with conflicts, and I had to realise that very often I took me quite some time to understand my behaviour in the little daily conflicts with the children and finding a more intelligent attitude in seeing what are the hidden needs behind a situation. I hope my eyes have been sharpened by reading the book, which for me is a very practical approach of applying spiritual principles in everyday life.

Every morning on my way to work I come across the Aare, a river flowing through Berne. At the moment the river is rapidly running with turquoise-blue waters coming from the melting masses of snow in the Alps. Crossing the bridge is just a matter of a few seconds, without remembering how difficult it would be without such a bridge, just standing there like something ordinary. But you wouldn’t be able to pass over, if people hadn’t constructed it.
I have come across people who were for me like a bridge to new realms of understanding. Without their help it would have been difficult to pass over. I think in all fields of knowledge and culture there is the need for such bridge builders, even if you don’t acknowledge their contribution. I experienced that this is especially so on the spiritual path where there are gaps in my understanding. Sometimes it were thoughts condensed in a book, but more helpful were exchanges with people, and for my experience especially the contacts with my spiritual teachers. Building the bridge to higher realms of consciousness is nearly impossible without such a help. And it is a work of inner bridging which you are doing with a continuous and systematic meditative work. In the Lunar Messenger on “Building the Bridge” there are some further thoughts on this. The effects of having built the bridge are seemingly natural, but it is a long way until the inner bridge is built.

At the moment I am working in my free time at the annual report for the Western groups of the World Teacher Trust, a socio-spiritual movement, with which we have been associated over the last 9 years. It is fascinating to get a little insight into the work done by various groups in Europe, North and South America, who, inspired by the wisdom teachings, are trying to integrate regular meditation and study with some volunteer service activity, besides the activities for one’s own economic indepency.
Balancing all these aspects is quite a challenge in modern life, which has quite other priorities. Our spiritual teacher, Dr. K. Parvathi Kumar, is an outstanding example of this intelligent integration – as a business man working actively in the economic, social and cultural fields, with spirituality as the basis.
Each group has quite another approach and a quality of its own. The intergroup networking to gain an insight into these service activities is only possible due to the use of our electronic equipments via computer, web-telephone, or the “classical” phones. This kind of co-operation would’t have been possible only a few years ago. It creates a new quality of interlinking in a free good-will work on the basis of a spiritual impulse, which the general commercial world with its economic power has already adopted in a highly sophisticated manner.