A friend sent me this well-done and urgent video of children from around the world addressing the adults about their destroying the planet through greed and a call for the Global Climate Strike 20 – 27 September.
(I could not find out from where it comes, I didn’t find it on YouTube or elsewhere, so I upload it here without giving due credits.)

The divine essence is described as being veiled by many envelopes. So it is not so easy for us to perceive it or even realize it. Furthermore, our personal / social / cultural conveniences influence and colour our attitudes, likings and dislikings. And the way how people express their relation to the divine is most varied.

I had to think about my own “coloured glasses” when a few days ago I saw pictures and a video from a ceremony in Pithapuram, India, probably of the celebration for the 700th anniversary of Sripada Srivallabha (see the text at the end of this blogpost, from my communication of the event). I noticed that I have to be careful to see the essence behind the outer pomp.

The words Sri Kumar had spoken after our first visit to Pithapuram in Jaunary 2015 came to my mind: “I hope you have enjoyed the visit to Peetha Puram called Pithapuram. It is a typical center where the light is hidden. As we say, the key note of India is ‘I hide the light’. Pithapuram is one of the most important spiritual centers that we have in India, but it continues to hide the light. It is so humble that unless you get insight, you don’t get the profundity of light. But in due course it unfolds from within. “

My contact with Sripada was in October 2014, through his biography. It was an intense inner experience followed by a long and profound work with the book in silence – translation and editing. It had a deep transforming impact and it is an ongoing experience. I found a similar impact of highest light at certain places where the veil seems to be thinner than elsewhere. You might call it spiritually vibrant places. It is very similar with certain books that also have a strong unveiling impact.

The communication: 2 September 2019: Ganesh Chaturdhi, 700th anniversary of Sripada Srivallabha

From time to time, Lord Dattatreya, the Cosmic Principle of the Teacher, incarnates in a human body to enable the humans to relate to him and get uplifted.

700 years ago, Lord Dattatreya took birth as Sripada Srivallabha. Sripada was born at sunrise on a day of Ganesh Chaturdhi in the year 1320 AD. Ganesh Chaturdhi is a festival in honour of Lord Ganesha celebrated on fourth ascending moon phase in Virgo.
Next Monday, 2 September, is Ganesh Chaturdhi, and thus, according to Indian counting, it is the 700th anniversary of this first incarnation of Dattatreya in the present dark age.

You find here a brief outline of the birth of Sripada (PDF). The text is taken from the WTT website about Lord Dattatreya and his incarnations:
based on the the biography “Sripada Srivallabha Charitamrutam” and on a transcription of the 2016 seminar of Dr. K. Parvathi Kumar on Lord Dattatreya / Sripada. The biography was recently published in English by Kulapati.de, see here how to order / download the book.

In the Eastern tradition, Krishna’s birthday is celebrated during the 8th descending moon phase of Leo, this being today.

I have written a number of blogposts and done various paintings about Krishna. Here is the story of a picture called “The Magic Flute of Krishna” realised seven years ago.

I used a picture of a Krishna statue in my room and did some transformations.

For the background I used a painting of Karl Friedrich Schinkel done for a stage design for Mozart’s opera Magic Flute (1815).

I fused it with a picture I had taken from a magazine 45 years ago – an extract of the Isenheim Altarpiece (1515), Colmar, by the German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald showing the emanation of angels from God.

Then I integrated the image of a peacock (bottom left), Krishna’s bird. I put the statue to dark blue; so the image emerged in violet – the right magical colour for Krishna with a “magic flute”.

In “Music of the Soul” and “Man Sacrifice“, Master EK gives the following birth dates according to Eastern Scriptures:
1. Lord Krishna was born in the month of July, 3228 B. C. midnight at Zero hours between the nineteenth and the twentieth.
2. He dropped His physical body on the eighteenth of February, 3102 B.C.
Thus, his birth chart looks like this:

Happy Krishna’s Birthday!

An Indian friend sent me a touching WhatsApp video which I also found on YouTube. The speaker, Radhanath Swami, is an American ex-hippie, a monk of the “International Society for Krishna Consciousness” (Hare Krishna movement) and today a spiritual leader who has done a lot of work in India for the very poor (read the interesting bio-details on Wikipedia).

It is an inspiring talk about Sindhutai Sakpal, an Indian social worker and social activist who has devoted her entire life to orphans. Both, Radhanath and Sinduthai, have made their way out of “nothing” to become great servers.

The video is an extract of a longer lecture at Cambridge University about “Influence without Affluence“.

From the background of space, there are periodic emanations of creation. They are seen as the radiations of the World Mother coming down through seven planes and in seven colours. Therefore, the Mother is symbolically depicted with a rainbow around her head. The Secret Doctrine speaks of sequences of time periods with a periodicity of seven like the biblical seven days of creation. There are units of seven planetary incarnations called a planetary chain and seven great cycles of humanity called the root races.

To illustrate the World Mother, I transformed a picture of Mary into the blue colour of the background. She is surrounded by a rainbow and seven globes of the planetary chain of our Earth. The globe at the bottom symbolises the physical manifestation of the fourth globe.

Radiant orbs around the Earth indicate the different stages of matter. The chain of seven smaller orbs above the Earth stands for the descent and ascent through the seven root races; the chain carries the glyph of Virgo. At the upper right corner, you can see the outline of the constellation.

See more pictures on the site with my paintings. If you want to print the image, you can download the file in medium and high resolution format.
The different zodiacal signs are clustered in groups – you can see here all my Virgo paintings.

Yesterday, a friend from Germany rang me up and enthusiastically told me about Ecosia, a free search engine that uses its profits to plant trees. Their business model: “You search the web with Ecosia. Search ads generate income for Ecosia. Ecosia uses this income to plant trees.”

I first was a bit sceptical – it sounded interesting but what is behind and how does it perform?

I looked up in Wikipedia: “Ecosia is an Internet search engine based in Berlin, Germany, that plants trees by donating 80% or more of its surplus income to non-profit organizations that focus on reforestation and conservationism. Ecosia considers itself a social business, is CO₂-negative, claims to support full financial transparency, protects the privacy of its users, and is certified by B-Lab as a benefit corporation. The website maintains a running total of the number of trees planted. According to their website, as of 14 August 2019, the search engine had been responsible for the planting of more than 64 million trees.”

I wondered how they can manage to present a search engine powerful enough in the competition with the big data octopus Google, which has gone far away from their earlier motto “do no harm”. But they have a strong partner- the search results for Ecosia are provided by Microsoft Bing, the second largest search engine in the US, after Google, enhanced by the company’s own algorithms. By the way, when you search on Ecosia “xxx #w”, it directly gives you the related Wikipedia article.

Other questions of mine were answered in their FAQ section: Ecosia’s servers run on 100% renewable energy, and every search request removes 1kg of CO2 from the atmosphere (also Bing is carbon neutral). They don’t sell the user data to advertisers, have no third party trackers and anonymize all searches within one week. They even publish their monthly financial reports, so you see exactly where the income from your searches goes.

So, I have now changed to Ecosia in my browers and bookmarked it. If you are using Android devices, you might have difficulties of setting Ecosia from 2020 on, as Wikipedia informs:

“As of 21 August 2019, Search Engine Land reported that Ecosia will not participate in the “search-choice” auction to appear on Android devices led by Google. This means that in 2020 European Android phone users will not have the option to set Ecosia as a default search engine. Christian Kroll explained the boycott decision saying: “We’re deeply disappointed that Google has decided to exploit its dominant market position in this way. Instead of giving wide and fair access, Google have chosen to give discrimination a different form and make everyone else but themselves pay, which isn’t something we can accept.” Applications to participate in the “search-choice” auction are due in mind-September.” (2019)

About hornets, spammers and subtle attacks…

When the summer was rising I noticed an increased activity of “flight operations” in front of my balcony windows: Big insects arrived with some speed, landed on the roller shutter and seemed to do an inspection there.

They were too big for wasps – hornets! They had invaded the roller shutter box and disappeared through some holes. I googled, found out that they were less aggressive than wasps – which had visited us on the other balcony in the past years – and that they were protected animals.

Fine, I thought – but each time I tried to air the room they managed to come inside and were vagabonding around. In the morning and evening I could easily guide them to the toilet by switching on the lamps there, opening the window and closing the door – gone. During the day it took more time to get them out again.

It was getting hot – something had to be done. One by one I stuffed the chinks along the roller shutter with plastic bags – they could get in through tiny holes. When they noticed my activities, they increased their efforts. They could not really remove the plastic though they tried to gnaw it away. However, they managed to dig a little hole into the wall.

A group of hornets stayed together in one corner while the others brought food – a bigger hornet – the queen was sitting in the centre. I didn’t dare to go too close with my camera.

I observed it for about two weeks and tried to deter them with clove oil – no effect. When some days it was raining, there seemed to be less hornets – and I found dead ones on the balcony. Then – three hornets, two, sometimes just one, the lonely queen. Sometimes I thought they were gone again but then several hornets flew an attack against the window, clashing against the glass. But window and door were closed.

Then about a week ago finally they had disappeared – though not totally. I sometimes still see them flying around but they must have found another save haven. I pondered on the meaning of this experience… They reminded me of my vagabonding thoughts in a turbulent meditation – how to keep the windows closed? Wakefulness, discrimination, “non-refoulement”…

Two weeks ago, there was another kind of attack:

My provider informed me that my “spam@” e-mail had been hacked; lots of e-mails had been sent from the account so that the provider had to shut it. At the same time I was flooded by return e-mails blocked by other providers. I quickly changed the password – my provider told me that after a few days the flood might go down again.

It did not but increased: The “spammer friends” used my e-mail address without sending from my account to distribute their e-mails where lonely ladies were longing for lusty lovers… Each day 1-2 thousand return mails from other providers – from east, west, north, south, in varous languages ….

My provider installed some filters on my server but it only had a small effect for two-three days, then again over thousand return mails popped in. My provider told me that the only thing I could do is to put filters in my webmail. And so I defined a number of filters deleting the return mails. I suppose that the mail flood abusing my e-mail address is still going high but there is again silence in the spam inbox.
And again, I pondered on the meaning of the experience – shut out any unwanted “over-activity” of outer impulses trying to drag us away from ourselves.

A third kind of experience:

A few days ago, the daughter of a friend skyped me and explained about some strange experiences in her neighbourhood – I don’t go into details but she described how she received subtle attacks draining her energy. I rate her as an alert and quite down-to-earth person not prone to fantasies. She knew already a number of things of how to protect herself from attacks but wanted to know more about it. (I had blogged already about protection from energy vampirism before, see also here.) We spoke about mantrams and exercises like the double pyramid to insulate oneself of destructive intrusions.

Like with the other attacks, of hornets or spam mails, you need to keep your protective shields strong and your thoughts pure. You find interesting hints in the books of Agni Yoga, esp. “Supermundane“:

“People protect themselves from poisonous gases by wearing gas masks. But they should provide themselves with one more mask — the protective mask of pure thought — for only thought can shield one from the poisonous breath. People should admit that there is such poison, and remember that thought has the power to resist the most harmful vibrations. ” (Supermundane 291)

“You may also ask how to counter unwelcome visitors — only through the valor of the spirit, not permitting them to contact your essence. Urusvati knows how these unwelcome guests have recoiled; it was not even necessary to drive them away, for they could not penetrate the protective net. Such natural protection is always the best, but for this, training of the spirit is required. Depression is the most gloomy magnet, and irritation also entices these ugly guests.” (Supermundane 430)

P.S.: A friend from Miami wrote me as a feedback about “Attack and Defence”:
“I also have been reflecting, sadly, because the opening of schools in Miami Dade has had the emphasis in surviving attacks. I understand that preparedness is important, but it is sad anyways.”
Indeed, a sad thing – training children in schools to survive shooting violence a horrible consequence of the craze for weapons…
 

I yesterday witnessed a strange and moving story of light and darkness:

In a previous blogpost, I mentioned a friend from Germany originally from Belarus. Two days ago, she told me that a friend of hers had contacted her “with the wish and courage to translate the English text of the biography of Sripada Srivallabha into Russian. She is a nun, and the Avatar Dattatreya is the main deity in her ministry… She is a pure soul and also speaks both languages well in the spiritual direction…”

I was thrilled that another step in the direction of the prophecy in the book that some hundred years after it was written it would be translated into many languages and go over the world.

When I read that this Russian lady is a nun related to Dattatreya, immediately images of Russian websites came to my mind where some years ago – it was in August 2016 – I had seen pictures of a beautiful ashram east of Moscow with a big golden statue of Dattatreya and other saints. (If you have the Google Chrome, go to the following pages -Russian- with automatic translation – I only use this browser for such cases…. you can download it here). I am not putting the images in this blogpost but please do see them.

They had done 108 sculptures of mahasiddhas and gods, they wanted to create a mandala of one hundred eight temples of unity of all religions. For this, they had created already a beautiful Avadhutta Dattatreya Temple, a Rishi Vasishtha Temple, a Temple of Seven Rishis and planned to do a Temple of Refuge. See here about their spiritual head, Swami Vishnudevananda Giri.

And here is another website about this Center of Vedic Culture ‘Divya Loka’ as a community of Russian-speaking followers of Hinduism (Sanatana Dharma).

When I told my friend of my findings, she sent me a picture of the destruction of the ashram by Russian autorities… I googled for images of the ashram – and found a Russian TV report of NTV.ru entitled, in English translation, “The temple of Nizhny Novgorod sectarians razed to the ground”. And: “The bailiffs decided to demolish three so-called churches at once in an abandoned village in the Nizhny Novgorod region, where members of a strange religious community have recently settled. Services were held there by the newly-minted and self-proclaimed guru. He is known in the world as a former political officer of the Ukrainian army. Regular trances, hypnosis, and cruel punishments for the smallest offenses drove adherents crazy.” See here the printscreen of the Russian original website and here with English translation. You can read more background information on the original site. See also the page about a series of suicides related to this place in 2014.

Fact or fabricated story? I had to think of persecutions in the name of state and religion in present and past and of spiritual aberrations. In the Indian scriptures, there are many stories about how the king of the devas (the beings of light, of spirit) became proud (behaved wrongly) and so the asuras (the forces of matter) attacked and destroyed the world of the devas. Only after turning to Narayana (the highest God or the pure existence) for help, they found the way back to the rightful path…

My friend wrote me, “Nothing new for Russia. The Roerich Museum was also closed.” (I had blogged about the museum before, see here and here.)

Thoughts came to me what Sri Kumar had repeatedly told us, that outer forms can be destroyed but the inner truth will manifest where time and space demand. That we do not build much outer structures to remain “light” and that we should try to live “normal temperament”, not creating special attention: “Much working can be done in silence provided there is ‘Normal Temperament’.”

I had a little exchange with the Russian lady. She is at the moment living in Nepal. She started reading the biography of Sripada Srivallabha and is willing to translate it. May the endeavour be blessed.

P.S. from February 2020: The lady told me in December that the book is already translated (wow!!!) and they are about to print it.

A friend of mine from France told me that she is now going on a journey to Mongolia, also to meet shamans. When I asked her to bring back some nice photos, she replied that she had already been there in 2013 and, “Here some photos from the sacred place called Shamballa.”

Photos from Shamballa (also spelled Shambhala, the White Island) I thought? I had written blogposts about this mythical place, also about parallels in the African language Kikongo; I had done several paintings about the glory of Shamballa and composed some texts on the basis of the Wisdom teachings; however, Shamballa, the seat of Sanat Kumara, is a place in the etheric plane in the area of Mongolia, near the desert Gobi. It is invisible for the normal eyes, but visible for people who have gained the etheric vision.

These photos were not something etheric but of a physical place. So I googled for “Shamballa Mongolia” – and found many similar photos of a place called the ‘Khamariin Khiid Monastery‘, or as it is called in Wikipedia, the ‘Khamar Monastery‘ in Mongolia.

Tripfreakz.com has an article about the background of this monastery in the south of Mongolia (“The mystical Shambala of Mongolia“), where they explain that in the beginning of the 19th century there lived Danzanravjaa, a Mongolian monk of the Red Cap Sect, who was very gifted and regarded as a reincarnation. He gave many predictions and also instructions on where to find Shamballa. At the vicinity of this place he erected a monastery in 1812 (or 1820 according to other sources, Wikipedia) near the town of Sainshand in Dorno-Gobi-Aimag  in the eastern Gobi. It was destroyed by the Stalinists in 1937, who killed many of the lamas. Danzanravjaa also predicted the date of his death; he was poisoned by his wife in 1856. Legend tells that he knew he was going to be poisoned, but he took the drink to fulfill his destiny.  The current monastery was built after the 1990 Democratic Revolution in Mongolia.

You find the place on Google Maps, even with Street View of the surroundings, and there is a nearby round structure on a mountain called “Energy Centre“.

I told this my friend asking if I can use the photos for a blog-post, and she said yes:

“It is necessary to make this place known to people in search of spirituality. It is not a place for tourists !!!! although the visit can make them evolve. It is a magical place in the Gobi Desert. For me it is not the real Shamballa which remains mysterious and inaccessible to humans for the moment. Maybe I’m mistaken. However, everyone talks about it like Shamballa and in any case the vibrations are very strong and it doesn’t explain how I felt.”

Yes, this centre seems to be a physical reflection of the etheric Shamballa on the subtle planes. A physical Shamballa structure can be destroyed by attackers. The spiritual reality of Shamballa, however, is indestructible. It is the highest world as per the living beings on this earth, the plane of pure existence and of perfect knowledge existing in us as the diamond consciousness in the head centre.

So this Khamariin Khiid Monastery in Gobi desert can well be regarded as a body of the reality of Shamballa.

Here are some more impressions from my friend’s journey:

10 days ago, I was invited to a summer party of the WTT group of Lake Constance. It promised to be a warm but not hot weekend. I took the highway via Konstanz (Constance) to cross the lake via ferryboat to Meersburg – a little holiday feeling.

A quarter of an hour later, around noon, I arrived at the home of my friends in Heiligenberg (‘Mountain of Saints’), with a castle overlooking the vailley. Manfred had to do some errands in preparation of the garden party and he invited me to lunch in an anthroposophic restaurant in Überlingen.

When we returned to their home, Sabine, his wife also had just arrived from school – she is a language teacher. Manfred is a retired industrial engineer and now an enthusiatic herbalist and wisdom teacher. (We had recently met at the May Call seminar in Mount Shasta.) He is focused on promoting knowledge about the healing power of plants. He has developed a huge network and is organising workshops on making herbal products for home use. And since both are also profoundly related to the wisdom teachings, another network of meditation and study developed. Over the years, I had participated in some of their group meetings. It is very inspiring to see how such a “flower-garden of seekers” can grow when it is well and regularly nurtured in a spirit of openness and synthesis. As an outer reflection Manfred has developed a beautiful lush garden with many different types of plants, especially with many different species of fragrant roses. He told me that he is inwardly relating to the plants and they grow there in all glory.

Friday evening around sunset time Sabine and I went swimming in a nearby beautiful bathing lake – summer fulness. The couple had already done quite a lot of preparations and I helped with some final arrangements. Saturday around 3 pm the group arrived, around 20 persons. We started with a meditation and some exchange and then the group went into the garden.

There were sprightly conversations – you could feel that the group connections had grown over the years. I enjoyed talking to various friends and especially exchanging with a new person and her daughter originally from Belarus but now living since many years in Germany – they had visited me the weekend before at our home in Switzerland. They told me about many Russian speaking people they know who are deeply interested in the wisdom teachings of WTT and we discussed of how this could be further developed.

Sabine had prepared a little slide show about the Mount Shasta and the May Call there and she asked me to give a short talk about it. Time quickly ran by, and when the guest had left we tried to clear up the garden as much as possible – an intense thunderstorm came during the night bringing lots of water.

In the morning, there were clouds hanging over the nearby hill and the flowers were still decorated with raindrops. We finished the clean-up work and had some conversations. Such group exchanges are always a good networking time, and so we discussed some ideas. When I set out for the journey back to Switzerland, the temperature had risen high again but I felt fulfilled with the impressions of the beautiful weekend.