The butterfly is a profound symbol of transformation – it goes through very different stages of its existence. A caterpillar has seemingly nothing to do with the strange chrysalis, and who would think that out of this immobile cocoon a beautiful flying being would emerge?

In our lives, we also might experience going through very different stages which seemingly have nothing to do with each other. There are clairvoyants, like Barbara Ann Brennan, who have observed with some people that for a longer period they are going through a time of pregnancy followed by a profound transformation, a second birth. During this time in the “psychic uterus” we might feel locked up, not knowing which direction our life wants to take. We are in a state of transition, which is frequently accompanied by deep inner crises and a reorientation of what we want to express in life. If you hold on, you might experience coming out of the chrysalis and step into a new life, where your soul’s intention can freely express – like a butterfly, symbol of the soul, coming out of the chrysalis and starting to fly.

Dinu, a friend from Mysore, whom I had visited in January, had his camera ready when a butterfly, a Plain Tiger, came out of the chrysalis. He documented it in his blog, “Dinu’s Yarden” (Yarden = Garden + Yard) and just sent me the link to the beautiful 2 min. video – must see!

There are millions of butterflies rising from out of their chrysalis but it needs a human eye to observe and a human heart to gain the inspiration and realise that it’s a story about his own soul.

The Plain Tiger just before eclosion. Pic: Dinakar KR (c)

In October, my wife Cyrille was at a weekend seminar on Earth Energies with Janet Treloar, whom she came to know from a pre-course for a spiritual regression formation with Andy Tomlinson which she now is starting in GB. During the weekend Janet used an iPhone-app for aura-photography (saying that apps for Android etc. don’t give good results…).

Cyrille was curious (me too!) to do some experiments herself, and so she got the old iPhone from our youngest son Nikolas who installed the app (for less than 2 euros). However, Nikolas was sure, as well as his brother, that the app is creating just some “colour magic” and not making any subtle vibrations visible. Cyrille and I thought, let’s make some experiments. And though we don’t understand how the app really functions – it seems that it interprets the waves taken by the pics and renders them, sensing emotions and/or etheric forms –  and how to interpret the colours and forms which sometimes present in a seemingly random way but there are some astonishing effects.

Since some years, Cyrille is training her sensitivity and has been studying and practicing spirit release work. She took the camera and went on a walk in a nearby forest with a friend. There they did a number of shots. Her friend felt intuitively drawn to a certain area:

Both were surprised about this dark cloud. Cyrille sent some light in it, with little success, as the following pic shows. A dark spot remained.

Taken aback, they went closer. Cyrille felt her familiar shiver indicating some subtle presence. She guessed an earthbound being there. Together with her friend, they released it, invoking their souls and archangel Michael. After the work, but still feeling the presence of the light beings, the next pic was taken.

Cyrille’s experiments are inspired to a great degree by the very interesting book of Louise Ireland-Frey, MD: Freeing the Captives. I was thrilled to read it. Though it is of course a topic discussed controversially, we have seen impressive results ourselves when working with spirit release.

At another occasion two weeks ago, my wife did a remote spirit release work via Skype together with a friend, let’s call her Ann. Ann’s friend, let’s call her Marta, had submitted herself some days before into a psychiatric hospital due to a psychic crisis. Ann had the impression that there were dark energies around. Cyrille and Ann did a remote release for Marta. Cyrille felt that there was some dark energy around Marta, and before they started the work, she took the following picture of herself:

After the release work, the dark energy was gone. At the same evening, Marta quite of a sudden felt much better. The next morning she left the hospital. An accidental coincidence?

Cyrille noticed that the pics become clearer when she takes them with an inner focus. So for the next three pictures she invoked the devas of our garden and of two trees:

The deva of the old walnut tree

The deva of the oak tree

The deva of the garden

And here is a pic I took of myself when doing the first shots with the aura-app. There were pics of quite different colours and forms – as I said before, some seem to be random, others in tune with what we thought to correspond with the situation.

I came across two very different videos which have something in common: Unmanned cameras provide vistas unseen before thus they discover astonishing new dimensions for a more holistic understanding.

The Government of Catalonia, Spain, has done a pilot project to evaluate the use of UAVs, popularly known as ‘drones’, in the field of public administration. They recorded images with drones inside and outside of the Abbey of Montserrat and the Montserrat Natural Park. Impressive views from bird’s eye.

Entering the Montserrat Monastery from above. Image (c) Generalitat de Catalunya

The other video is even more spectacular: 3D views of the valleys, canyons, lava flows and the highest known mountain in the Solar System on the surface of Mars. The pics are taken by a high resolution stereo camera on board the Mars Express spacecraft. The topography of the Red Planet appears so three-dimensional that you could walk through it. This is possible because of the unusual imaging principle used by the camera: Nine light-sensitive detectors sweep the surface in sequence from nine different observation angles. This data is then processed into three-dimensional images by the DLR German Aerospace Center.

The scientists put the camera images together piece by piece like a jigsaw puzzle, creating a global map of Mars. Of the 145 million square kilometres of the surface of Mars, 97 million have already been covered at very high resolution, where one pixel corresponds to less than 20 metres on the surface. Almost the entire surface of Mars has now been imaged at a resolution of better than 100 metres. “We can see the entire topography almost as well as if we were standing on Mars ourselves,” says Jaumann, project manager for the mission at the DLR (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt).

The spacecraft with the camera on board was launched on 2 June 2003. Since its arrival at Mars six-and-a-half months later, it has orbited the planet over 12,500 times. The video was released by the DLR German Aerospace Center as part of the ten years of Mars Express celebrations in June 2013.

View of the Valles Marineris (C) DLR video

If you want to walk at the surface of the Red Planet, have a look at this 30° Gigapixel image from NASA’s Mars Exploration Program and its rover named Curiosity. Well, in view of the rugged surface, I wouldn’t like to live there.

“You are the infinite in your own way – the connection is within yourself…. Be the idea, be the deed… And no one of you is outside the heart of all that IS… Out of your soul be Light. For you are nothing else…” An amazing video visualising the cosmic connectedness and the etheric world.

Pic from the video (c)

The Canadian film maker, musician and meditation teacher Daniel Schmidt and his wife Eva Dametto have created a beautiful film called “Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds“. The film could be described as the external reflection of their own adventures in meditation. The movie consists of 4 parts which they have published for free on YouTube: Part 1 Akasha, Part 2 – The Spiral, Part 3 – The Serpent and the Lotus, and Part 4 – Beyond Thinking. There is also an additional musical part, called Pranava – Deep Chant and Yantra Meditation, and a trailer.

On their website you see their profound motivation which is behind these films:

“It became clear during the making of the film that Inner Worlds Outer Worlds had to be released for free for the benefit of all beings. In the ancient traditions the dharma or “the truth” was always taught freely and never for personal gain or profit in order to preserve the purity of the teachings. It is Daniel and Eva’s belief that to awaken one’s true self, one must awaken the entire world. Daniel and Eva have started the Awaken the World initiative www.awakentheworld.com to bring the ancient knowledge back to the earth in order to restore balance and harmony on the planet.”

Even if you don’t have the time to see all the videos, it is worthwhile to have a look – beautiful images and good texts. You can read more on the Facebook-page of the film. Or, if you feel motivated to “spread the word”, there is also a call for help to translate.

A spiral – a manifestation of the basic energy of life (c) from the video The Spiral

Part 1 Akasha
“Akasha is the unmanifested, the “nothing” or emptiness which fills the vacuum of space. As Einstein realized, empty space is not really empty. Saints, sages and yogis who have looked within themselves have also realized that within the emptiness is unfathomable power, a web of information or energy which connects all things….”

Part 2 – The Spiral

“The Pythagorian philosopher Plato hinted enigmatically that there was a golden key that unified all of the mysteries of the universe. The golden key is the intelligence of the logos, the source of the primordial om. One could say that it is the mind of God. The source of this divine symmetry is the greatest mystery of our existence….”

Part 3 – The Serpent and the Lotus

“The primordial spiral is the manifested world, while Akasha is the unmanifested, or emptiness itself. All of reality is an interplay between these two things; Yang and Yin, or consciousness and matter. The spiral has often been represented by the snake, the downward current, while the bird or blooming lotus flower has represented the upward current or transcendence….”

Part 4 – Beyond Thinking

“We live our lives pursuing happiness “out there” as if it is a commodity. We have become slaves to our own desires and craving. Happiness isn’t something that can be pursued or purchased like a cheap suit. This is Maya, illusion, the endless play of form….”

The wisdom teachings refer to the manifested creation as an inverted tree. In the 15th chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna says: “The whole Creation is an inverted tree. The roots are up above, the branches are down below”. The branches (manifestations) of Nature are downward, towards the gross matter, and the roots (causes) are above, in the subtler planes. The wisdom teachings describe the downward movement into objectivity as female (Nari), and the ascending movement as male (Nara). Both movements together form the cosmic person, Narayana.

We are just in the month of Scorpio. Socrpio has to do with profound transformation, with going through the depth of matter and the chance of turning back to the spirit. As a starting point of this painting to the month of Scorpio, I took a picture of snow-capped Tibetan mountains reflecting in a lake, and I digitally warped the mountains into a downward u-form. At the top I placed a tree as the original “idea” of the tree. It is projected downwards into the lake, the inverted tree of creation. I took a photo of the Vitruvian Man of Leonardo da Vinci, took away the extra arms and legs and integrated him into the tree. His head is penetrated by the roots from the upper tree – receiving the ideas from cosmic dimensions. Then, I extracted the Venus from a photo of Botticelli’s famous painting “The Birth of Venus” and fused her, downwards, into the Vitruvian Man, thus creating the male-female Androgyn. I worked on the painting with pencils. I transformed a photo of the roots of a tree and put them, pointing downwards, in several faint layers around the upper tree: The roots are in the blue space at the top, the manifestation of the tree extends below.

You might like to have a look at my other paintings.

16 July 2013, A 5, pencils and photo work

I’m not really a fan of Japanese Anime films, and years have passed by since I “read” the last Manga comix when my sons were still younger. But recently I stumbled across an Anime video called “The Rebirth of Buddha“. Somehow I was drawn into the fantastic story, and my wife and me kept on viewing.

You can read about the story in a short or an interesting long version in Animenetwork.com. It says that behind the film there are people inspired by a Japanese neo-spiritualist movement called “Happy Science”. But this I only came to know later when I searched a bit the web. And it seems that the story is illustrating a book of the founder of Happy Science: An article about the movie says: “The film illustrates Happy Science’s belief that the religious figure Buddha will return ‘when the world sinks into darkness’.” This is precisely what Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita, that “When Dharma, the Law, is significantly disturbed and the world and its existence are being threatened, then I come down to establish the Law.” And it reminds of the expectations of a return of the Christ or of the Shi’ites waiting for the coming of the Imam Madhi…

What attracted my interest was the way the movie is presenting realities from the subtle worlds in the presentation. The film starts showing how Sayako, a young high school journalist, hears about the suicide of Kanemoto, a newspaper reporter she admires, and slowly develops clairvoyance. She sees how spirits and dark thought forms are moving around. On a train station she is nearly drawn in front of a moving train by a dis-incarnated soul and saved in the last moment by a friend. In these seconds she witnesses how the reporter who had committed suicide is standing in front of a council of Elders – like it is being described by hypnotherapeutic “Life between lives” researches like those of Michael Newton.

The plot of the film is a big battle between the powers of good and of evil – with alien attacks and gigantic mass manipulation by Arai, the “false Messiah”, fought by Sorano, the re-born Buddha, and with the help of Sayako. And in between there are some sermons of the new Buddha, probably spreading the beliefs of “Happy Science” and the hope of a big “bling” to solve all the problems. However, you meet various scenes where they quite well present subtle realities: The visual realization of the spirits of mass manipulation reminded me of descriptions of Aurobindo and the Mother about the psychic effects of fear and of contagious diseases.

Though the story is full of spirito-fiction, sometimes diving into kitsch, the film is very well produced and of a high visual quality. Enjoy.

Sorano, the Buddha reborn, healing a boy possessed by evil spirits. Picture (c) from the video

Since many years I’m inspired by the work of Nicholas Roerich and his wife Helena. The paintings of Nicholas emanate a radiance and profundity which is very uplifting. And the Agni Yoga series received by Helena are full of spiritual depth.

Today I came across a film about the Roerichs (no more available due to copyright issues), by Lyudmila Shaposhnikova (1h10′): “Roerich – The Call of Cosmic Evolution”. The description says that “In the film for the first time is discovered the evolutionary meaning of their eminent contribution to the world culture. The philosophy of cosmic reality ‘Living Ethics’, Central Asian Expedition, Himalayan Institute of Scientific Research ‘Urusvati’, an international treaty known as the Roerich Pact were the main evolutionary actions of Roerichs which enabled to shape a new thinking and a new cosmic mentality on our planet.”

Among others the film gives an insight into the beautiful new Roerich Museum in Moscow, the “International Center of the Roerichs” situated in the very heart of Moscow.

Photo of the museum (c) International Center of the Roerichs

In the museum there is the Masters Hall, the Central Asian Expedition Hall, the Banner of Peace Hall, and others… You can also take a virtual tour through the Asian Hall of the museum. In the video it says that the heritage of Roerich was moved from India to Russia. The exposition encompasses every aspect of Nicholas and Helena Roerich’s life and heritage, bringing together art, philosophy, spiritual quest, scientific research and their wide-ranging philantropic endeavour.

View of the painting “Fiat Rex” in the “Masters Hall”.

I also discovered that the Roerich Museum of New York has done a relaunch of their website since the last time I saw it. They now have nice slideshows and photo galleries.

In the symbolic journey through the zodiac, Libra represents the illusions into which the soul loses itself when it gets disconnected with the thread of Light.

I visualised it as a ravine and superimposed on it the structure of a labyrinth, depicting the windings of our intellect, our brain. There is a bridge of Light leading over the gap, and in the background there is the light of a huge unfolding flower of consciousness.

A pilgrim, symbol of the eternal part of the soul, is standing at the left side and looking down into the abyss.

At the left rock face, you see the volumes of a library, representing the great masses of knowledge where you can get lost in concepts. An old man is sitting in front of the wall of books, absorbed in studying.

A sage with a rod is observing him. He represents Saturn, the Lord of Time and the inner ruler of Libra. He is the guardian of the threshold who keeps you in a situation until the lesson is learnt.

At the bottom you see a snail, symbol of the slowly moving spiral of time.

At the centre, a young lady in white, representing the aspiring soul, is looking up to the guiding angel at the right. She is listening to him and is ready to ascend from the narrow abyss towards the Light.

The figures in this picture are taken from photos or transformed from paintings of Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1889) and Louis Janmot (1814-1892). You find more paintings in my gallery.

20 May 2013, A 5, pencils and photo work

Lately I came across the open source platform for Vedic and Western astrology,  Maitreya. It has been realised by IT architect Martin Pettau. He learned Yoga and astrology under the guidance of the late Yogi Paramapadma Dhirananda (from the Kriya-Yoga line of Babaji, Lahiri Mahasaya, Sri Yukteswar, Paramahansa Yogananda and Paramahansa Hariharananda).

The software is free for personal and professional use. It has been translated into a number of languages. All major desktop platforms are supported: Windows, Max OS X, Linux and UNIX.

Besides the technical details, you find on the website information about general and Vedic astrology and other topics. So if you are interested in working with the subtle aspects of time, this might be a helpful tool.

About the purpose of the software Martin writes:

• First goal is to serve as tool. The software has a lot of standard features for the daily work of western and Vedic astrologers. So it can save their time and energy; they can concentrate on the work of interpretation.
• Second goal is to enable astrologers for research. The program supports a lot of calculation options, so it can be used as a basis for research on the various questions of astrological calculation and interpretation.
• Third goal is to attract people and motivate them to learn astrology. Learning astrology is a complicated task because formal knowledge of planets, signs, Dasas etc. is not sufficient, but intuition and non-attachment to worldly affairs must be developed, too. So a “cool” astrology software may help in increasing the desire for that kind of knowledge.

He further emphasizes: “Astrology cannot be learned from books. Astrological software can only be a tool for the astrologer’s work. So the name of the software emphasizes the importance of divine inspiration on top of formal knowledge or astrological techniques.” This is a very important hint.

As per the name of the software he explains: “In classical Indian scriptures Maitreya is the ardent disciple of Maharishi Parasara, the author of Brihat Parasara Hora Shastra, the most prominent scripture of Vedic astrology. In this scripture the sage instructs his disciple on the various topics of Vedic astrology.”  If you want to read more about Maitreya, you might read the book “Lord Maitreya” by Sri K. Parvathi Kumar.

The software is free. In the FAQ-section it says:  “How can I make a donation?” – “Thank you for that noble offer. Please donate for religious purposes or for the poor and needy people on this planet.”

And this is a noble answer. There is a spiritual law which seems to be easy but is mostly forgotten today: As per the energetic balance there is no such thing as “free taking”. For everything you get or take without some kind of giving you receive and amass a subtle load. This is mostly not taken note of, even of those who “know” about it. This is true also for everything you get “free” from the web – and might be stocked on your computer, blocking some space on it, besides the energetic aspect.

So it is necessary to keep a good balance by more giving than taking. You don’t have to give towards the source from where you get something but you also can give in a direction where energy (money, time, loving attention) is needed. Otherwise you won’t really get any benefit of a program you download – you probably might not even use it.

Maitreya Series: Banners of the Coming One, by Nicholas Roerich, 1925-1926. Nizhnii Novgorod State Art Museum, Russia