On the 31st a friend of mine, Meinrad, and I started our tour. The first stop was Mysore, were a friend of mine, Dinu, had invited us. His wife and he picked us up in the hotel. On the way to his home I asked him where the famous sandalwood trees of Mysore were growing, and he said that everywhere thieves are cutting them in the night, they had stolen a tree from his garden. We went to the house of a friend of him, and engineer, – and there they had a sandalwood tree in the beautiful garden – it was surrounded by a metal coating to prevent a nightly cutting. In their home they showed us very precious old sandalwood carvings, which today there are no more artists to do such artwork. Even after more than 200 years the wood was smelling. He gave a piece of sandalwood to Meinrad and me.

At Dinu’s home we had a nice exchange, where his daughter joined us. She is a good photographer, like the father. Later we went to the site of Ananda Vana, where the Mysore group of the WTT has constructed an open hall and a spacious house. There regular classes in spiritual education are given to the children of the neighbouring villages as well as free homoeopathic treatments. They also Guru Pooja celebrations. We had our evening meditation – a vibrant atmosphere permeated the atmosphere.

Afterwards we drove to the home of another group member. The family had gathered and we enjoyed a flute, mandolin and guitar concert. They showed us a photo of a Master who had been working in the surroundings in utter silence and unknown to the masses. He passed about 25 years ago. The photo showed his mahasamadhi (leaving the body), sitting there in a lotus position like being still alive.

Every year on December 29th there is a celebration introduced by Master CVV for group initiation about 100 years ago. The December Call celebration was short, but intense. Getting up early in the morning, leaving the hotel around 4.30 am for a 30 minutes drive through the awakening city to Sadguru Tapovana, the centre of WTT Bangalore, where the group has constructed  over a dozen houses and a spacious hall for celebration. The whole premises had been developed a lot since I was there the last time 3 years ago.

Around 5.30 the gathering started with a morning ritual followed by meditation and a lecture by Sri Kumar. He gave comments of the book “A Treatise on White Magic”, Rule 12 – Interludes and Cycles. The basic topic it the fundamental importance of pulsation with its phases of expansion and contraction in different fields of life, especially the importance of the interludes between one phase and the other.:

“In all planes existence and awareness happen When awareness joins existence there is no consciousness. It is pulsation. Form out of THAT the first awareness is emerging. As it emerges it has the inspiration to come back. It leaves and comes back. That is how the pulsating principle enables to stay connected to THAT. Without pulsation we don’t have connection. Pulsation enables all the planes of existence. There is pulsation at the grosser, subtler, causal planes, everywhere. When there is no pulsation the two become one, the awareness is absorbed into THAT.

It contracts and expands, when it is out it wants to come back. Happening within the cosmic nature and the cosmic substance permanently pulsate…”

On the 29^th there was a fire ritual in the morning followed by a presentation of gifts on the occasion of the December Call. And in the evenings there were impressive cultural presentations by groups of children – recitations, Indian dance, little theatre performances.

On the 30^th in the afternoon we were invited to the inauguration of the new premises of an ayurvedic treatment centre by a group member, where Sri Kumar gave a short talk:

A welcome in the ayurvedic centre

“J M Murthi is an ayurvedic master. He has been doing many cures. We are trying to organise his knowledge in the name of Master Holistic Centre, teaching ayurveda, homoeopathy and other knowledge to which humanity is looking, medicine without side-effects like allopathy. Ayurveda has been much more recognized on the planet the last time, how the 5 elements are functioning in the body. The father of Master EK touched great heights of Ayurveda. In his name and memory this foundation is started. It is called the Bharadwaja Ayurveda Chikitsa Kendra, see also here. Cleansing of almost all parts of the body is done here. So we started the Master Holistic Health Foundation…“

Sri Kumar with the picture of the father of Master EK.

The meeting was very well organised by the Bangalore group. There was a group of about 20 people from the West, from Argentina, Venezuela, Spain, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland – and some Indians from the States. I enjoyed the exchanges with friends and time passed by very quickly.

It was a big jump to India, last Thursday, like zooming through space and time. I woke up early morning, after a bit turbulent night – some computer problems had to be fixed, and my son did a long night work… Last packing, then to the railway, heading to the airport. When I was sitting in the automatic train to the departure docks it was like going to some spaceport, to the “space capsule” called airplane.

Up in the air and flying through a mixture of virtual and “real” reality” made me lose the mind-set and well-known structures of everyday reality: My body was sitting in teh plane, but my mind was in a motion picture, not to speak of the subtle bodies trying to find their way to the East.

I was looking a movie, “Men in Black”, full of encounters with aliens and of time travels. AAnd when I landed in the “limbo-state” of Dubai there were “women in black” and encounters with “alien cultures” in a cross-over of tired-out passengers, packed shopping malls and advertisements everywhere – “connecting with the “cloud”, as one said.

“Men in White” and artificial palms…

… and a real palm tree seen from my hotel window in the “Crystal Castle” hotel, which wasn’t a crystal castle – oh, reality!

Next morning in Bangalore there was a warm welcome by an Indian brother from the Bangalore group of the WTT picking me up. I enjoyed the smells an colours of India. But in my sleep-deprived state I was even more feeling in some movie-like state when we drove a 1.5 hs zig-zag path to the other side of Bangalore, directly to the site of the group living, Satguru Tapovan. I dropped into a full hall during noon meditation, sat down right in the front, closed my eyes and dropped away – A powerful energy swept in, the whirling thoughts and images in my head met with a great silence behind the mass of impressions. And when I opened my eyes Sri Kumar gave me a warm welcome smile from the stage.

When I later went to a toilet, I realised that I was in India: no water was in the toilet tank, no water came out of the water tap at the wash basin, just from another one at a bucket. But in front of the house there was a beautiful mandala drawn with fresh chalk. In Switzerland the water installations would be functioning, but no one would be able to draw such a beautiful mandala.

A friend sent me the link to a video of Master Puppetji, the puppet Guru in his mission to “squash illusion with Wizdumb, humour and meaningless insights. Puppetji cuts through the spiritual mumbo-jumbo and gets right to The Truth: According to Puppetji.”

Enjoy. And find more wisdumb on his website. Or go to his shop: “Buying the gifts for friends and family is good karma and it helps to stimulate the economy” 🙂 How true! And he has also a cup for “devoteas”, see below.

In this latest video he speaks on the “Karmaggedon” of 21 December 2012 – we survived, but what will we do? On YouTube you find more stuff about the truth – according to Puppetji.

This is Master Puppetji speaking

The mug for enlightenment – by Guru Puppetji

On this site you can zoom through the cosmos and see our galactic neighbourhood of 100 000 stars from different dimensions. So if you don’t know yet how to beam yourself through the universe or have a powerful starship in your garage, this is a good way to travel around.

Tomorrow is Winter Solstice and the beginning of the month of Capricorn. I have just published a new painting for the month, also as an e-card for Christmas. I did it already on 11 August 2012 and called it “Capricorn – The Dawn and the Light of the Higher Heart Centre”. How did the picture come about?

Capricorn is also called The Mount. On the painting you see bright mountains in the background – Himalaya summits – which I transformed a bit – in bright sunlight, symbols of striving to the heights, be it in the outer or in the inner. In the foreground there is the dark blue silhouette of a meditator, symbol of diving into the subjective worlds. A huge eight-petalled lotus of the higher heart centre carries in its centre the entrance to the inner light. The stalk is rising from out of a reddish sun and fiery flames surround the lotus. The sky above the mountains merges with cosmic spheres and at the same time the inner of the meditator. At the top of his head the jewel in the lotus radiates an electric blue light.

For some days I meditated on thoughts from Spiritual Astrology, and the picture developed in the inner: I perceived the huge lotus of the higher heart centre, a dark blue silhouette over-towering steep Himalayan mountains merging with the starry sky above.

When the inner picture is clear there just remains the task to bring it down – and that is where the meditative work starts. At the beginning I ask the Masters for help, for it is my experience that the flow of ideas takes to the right direction when guided from inside. I’m in a kind of elevated state as long as there is this flow – and when I get stuck, I have lost the inner connection. This picture developed quite fast. I took a mountain range from a collection of Himalayan valleys I had googled before – the same with a huge white lotus – and compressed it a bit to give the impression of altitudinarian summits.

I transformed a picture of Master MN, cut out the contour and changed the silhouette to black and a copy of it to dark blue. I made other copies, started creating layers in Photoshop to modify the nuances and experimented with different scenes of dawn and sunrise. For the lotus of the head I took a photo I made from an artwork of a friend and transformed it in perspective. And again several layers in different gradations. Then I took a photo of the constellation of Capricorn and transformed it to form the sky. I duplicated it, minimised and rotated it to place it at the inner of the head – the outer sky reflected in the inner

Then I printed the picture and started working on the colour transitions with pencils. This way the forms become softer and one colour subtly transits into the other, even if they are strong contrasts there is no hard border.

Since 2 years I always listen to some songs of Davide Swarup done with a new percussion instrument, the hang. It has certain similarities with steel drums, but is more melodious. Again and again I hear the same series of songs and they are very inspiring for me. They also accompanied me with this image.

Finally I scanned the picture again, did some final retouching and then did prints of a small format until the colours have the right luminosity. Afterwards looking at the new-born child of the soul I familiarise myself with the picture and show it to my wife before putting it on the altar to shine there for some days.

Today was a very important moment for me: I got a phone call from the printing office that I could pick up the pictures. They had produced 36 prints of my paintings with a special technique in A2 format and some in A3. I blogged about my “Experiments with Pictures” mid-November. Last Thursday I already had been in the print shop to control the prints, and then they had to be wrapped for transportation. I was thrilled about the good quality and the luminosity of the colours. It had been a long way while searching the right method with quite some waste producing.

So I took the car to pick up the paintings. It was heavily raining. When I saw the ready-packed pictures it was a solemn moment for me, though in the print-shop it probably was “business as usual”.

Walking through the basement of the printing office

The graphic designer who had accompanied the process putting the pictures on the forklift…

… and then into the car

At home on the sofa, ready for unpacking

Phoenix out of the ashes: the first of my “Fiery Paintings” done in September 1981, destroyed in 1997, now restored from a photo to its original beauty. It’s the only one of the old paintings I got produced now.

Unpacking and storing: though the photo doesn’t show, the quality of the colours is and the production is very neat.

An upcoming documentary called “Landfill Harmonic” is presenting a remarkable musical orchestra in Cateura, Paraguay – a “Recycled Orchestra”, where the young musicians play instruments made from trash. The film of  The Creative Visions Foundation (CVF) shows how a humble garbage picker in the barrios of Paraguay uses his ingenuity to craft instruments out of recycled materials – – all made from recycled metal drums, tin cans, and plastic pipes. The film portrays some of the children who learned to play violin, flute, drums, cello, string bass, and how a youth orchestra is born:

“Landfill Harmonic shows how trash and recycled materials can be transformed into beautiful sounding musical instruments, but more importantly, it brings witness to the transformation of precious human beings.”

You can like the project on Facebook to spread this inspiring initiative; a longer version of the video trailer is available here.

Pictures credit (c) Landfill Harmonic

Google Maps and NASA have just published a new global view and animation of Earth’s city lights. It is a composite assembled from data acquired by a satellite over nine days in April 2012 and 13 days in October 2012. It took 312 orbits to get a clear shot of every parcel of Earth’s land surface and islands. This new data was then mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/NOAA NGDC. Here are some pics on Mashable, and below a video of the pics. You find more on the NASA site.

A fantastic, light-filled view of our dear home planet’s beauty.

The Black Marbe. Credits: NASA

As a farewell-gift when leaving my job a colleague gave me a book about men over 80 telling about their lives. I’m reading it with fascination as a bedtime book, impressed about the variety and intensity of their paths.

I’m just reading the story of an architect / biologist explaining in a vivid way his experiences and reflections about how machines and electronics are controlling us instead of the other way round. He gives examples of  how we subordinate our thoughts and our will-to-form to the conditions of the computer screen, how the connections of the brain-currents in the nerves are cut off from the movements of the hand with a pencil, how a sensuousness gets lost and loud slogans without much content come at the place of deeper content and quality, which are more inconspicuous and self-evident. The way he describes his experiences as an architect when constructing a landscape park in Zurich show that he is a keen observer, a passionate maker and shaper and isn’t just plunging into a critique of the present.

It made me think of how the electronic media have shaped my life and inter-relations. For the last 12 years I have been professionally active in digital communication and have actively taken part in shaping and developing it in my surroundings, with the development of websites, social media channels, the management of digital documents and media, with newsletters and extensive writing. I am handling a lot of communication and inter-relations with these tools – quantities and kinds of relations which otherwise wouldn’t be possible, especially on a global scale.

However, I note that many of these relations are very abstract, confined to short exchanges – a short “hello”, requests or giving some information and help to people, often in some remote corners of the planet. The keyboard is the main instrument, linked to the PC with its screen. There is little physical interrelation. Even the more concrete interactions via phone or Skype are reducing the interaction to an acoustic or sometimes visual transmission. With some persons I feel the presence of their being, even through these channels; they are like physically here. Mostly it is a thin, vague interaction, not even demanding much attention, probably not even with much impact.

At the same time there is such a flooding of information, seeking attention. The day before yesterday I answered a friend who sent me an article from a German newspaper, telling him: “I sometimes don’t know how to help myself with all the many interesting articles, statements etc. I don’t get around to read them; if I would do so, there wouldn’t be any-more time for the essentials. So I got today this long (“wonderful to read”) article, see enclosed. If you like and have time for it, you can read it…” I felt a bit snippy, answering flooding with flooding: “Similia similibus curentur” – curing by using the simile. Does it really cure or is it a “placebo”?

When I hear someone saying “I don’t have time…” I always hear “I don’t want to give my attention / energy to…” So when someone says, “I don’t have time for visiting / phoning / writing you”, it says, “I can’t give my energy to visiting / phoning / writing you.” It’s ok, attention is a rare  source, and there are enough energy-vampires around, making us feel depleted – the whole rush and pressure of our lifestyle. When I put a “like” or a short comment on Facebook, it’s like a surrogate of communication – showing, that I thought of the other, but at the same time keeping it low-level, non-committal. I seem to be there, but without much of my presence. So there remains a void.

There are so many Facebook birthday posts and mails coming in today – my living room would have be full to accommodate so many “friends”. But there is no-one – and it would be difficult with all the cakes…. E-mails often have a higher intensity, and more so real letters do. But the amount of letters decreases – just one came – and e-mails are more easily to dissolve with a “delete”.

How deep is an impact? I somehow sense whether there is a presence behind and how profound it is. Presence is a strange phenomenon, it has to do with energy. When you feel the touch of the heart, then there is the presence. When there is just a digital whirring, it’s just a mask of the presence. Presence and attention seem to be inter-related. I wonder how I will manage the upcoming flood of Christmas and New Years greetings. I decided to invest some time in phone-calls instead of non-committal copy-paste of “warm regards” or Merry-Christmas-postings. The Christmas-marketing in the city and the media will soon be over again. The flame of inner presence hopefully not.

3 birds “twittering” in our garden this morning