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Board of Administrators John Drew
President |
The European Transpersonal Association ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,January 1st 2001Newsletter Number 8 Dear Members and Friends of EUROTAS Greeting at the beginning of the new Millennium and may the New Year bring you joy, the fulfillment of your aspirations and good contacts across Europe with old friends and new. There is much happening in Europe of relevance to EUROTAS and the transpersonal and below you will find a few details which I hope will be of interest. Please keep writing to me with accounts of your activities and interests so that a wider audience can hear from you and what you are doing. 1. EUROTAS Meeting at Munsbach Castle, Luxembourg, 10-13 May 2001 We are delighted to invite you to our EUROTAS annual Council Meeting and the Third Meeting of the EUROTAS Creative Initiative. Please respond as soon as you can to our Luxembourg hosts to confirm participation and please make enquiries among your friends who might participate. Numbers are limited so please reserve your place soon. While the thread of our meetings each year is the same, the colour and context is very much decided by our local hosts. We are very fortunate that following our special meetings in Hungary in 1999 and Germany in 2000, the Luxembourg team have been working to arrange a very special castle for us which we will have entirely to ourselves. I am sure you will enjoy the lovely country surroundings and the very comfortable accommodation and good food. You can find all the details and application forms on our website www.eurotas.org or write or fax for more details to this address: Address: MTK, Alfred Groff Tel.: 00352-406619 (Alfred Groff) B.P.54 Fax.: 00352-719027 (Margret Frosch) L - 8005 Bertrange e-mail: Froschfrosch@web.de Luxembourg e- mail: MTKLUX@hotmail.com (MTK - Verein) The MTK Luxembourg co-ordination group preparing the meeting are: Alfred Groff, Margret Frosch Pascal Van Copenoll, Madelaine Dolon, Marie-Rose Fritz, Isolde Hetterich, Malu Holzem, Serge Kruchten,Ursula Müller, Claude Pauly, Christian Sarti and Tilli Wengler-Hahn 2 The Creative Initiative The Board and Co-ordinators of the Creative Initiative will meet in Heemstede from 12-14 January to discuss the future of the Creative Initiative which as you know has provided the framework for our EUROTAS meetings over recent years. You can find the draft results of our work on the EUROTAS webpages. In the work of the "Creative initiative" there have been so far seven Expert Committees. 1. European Transpersonal Communication. Rumold Mol (Netherlands) 2. Training of Transpersonal Therapists. Monique Tiberghien and Victor Goncalves (Portugal) 3. European Spiritual Emergency Network. Ank van Gulik (Netherlands) 4. Transpersonal Vision in Management and Government. John Drew, (UK) 5. The Transpersonal Vision in health. Beata Bishop. (United Kingdom) 6. Transpersonal Education. Tanna Jakubowitz-Mount. (Poland) 7. Transpersonal Research. Pia Keiding (Belgium, Denmark) Others have been proposed: 8. The idea of a European spiritual university - John Drew (United Kingdom) 9. Creativity,Innovation and Art. - Fausto Sergei Sommer(Switzerland) Sue Michaelson (United Kingdom) 10. Consciousness, Management and Society. Alfred Groff (Luxembourg) 11 .Meditation. Andrej Gostev and Evgueny Faidych, (Russia) Wilfried Belschner (Germany) The definitive list of committees and the final programme will be drawn up when the co-ordinators of the Committees and the Board of Eurotas meet in January. In the meantime if you have any thoughts,corrections or input please send them to Rumold Mol preferably before the 12 January so that they can be taken into account at our meeting. Rumold Mol, the initiator of the “Creative Initiative” asks that we all make a special effort to find addresses of EXPERTS who might be interested to join us. What is meant by this are people who, by their influence and work in their own specialised fields, have acquired public and official recognition and will thus be able to offer valuable help and a very good base for us to work on. We are thinking of politicians, artists, writers and scientists of various disciplines, managers, journalists, film- makers and so forth. If you think you know such people that might have an interest in our work, please let Rumold have details, so that we can officially invite them. 3. From Russia with love Sorry
for keeping silent for such a long time. Only yesterday I have returned
from an expedition Baikal lake and the Caucasian mountains. We were
at about 3000 meters in a very beautiful and mystical valley which has
the name of 7 lakes. It was surprising time. Our expedition on Baikal
was marvelous. The main purpose of the trip was to study the traditions
of local shamans, hold seminars in Celtic labyrinths and harmonise power
places of the Baikal region. This is one of the most interesting places
on our planet. We were living on a small island Olkhon in the centre
of Baikal. Landscapes are fantastic here. Here are mountains, fields,
springs, sand beaches, forests. Here are many flowers and herbs. We
prepare very tasty tea from local herbs. And the most interesting thing
is that we are studying shaman traditions of this region. One of such sites is known as Shaman Rock. It ends with a very picturesque cape Burchan where an ancient cave is situated. It was here where an ancient sacred shaman place dated back to the Neolithic period has been found. It is possible to notice an image of the shaman painted with mineral paints and preserved until nowadays. Later a Buddhist temple was here. And then the image of St. Nicolas appeared in it. It was very interesting for us to sense the polar energies of this place. We experienced the feeling of horror in it's northern part, while it's southern part seemed to be a kingdom of peace, light and love. In the result of computer scanning of the site we got the Kalachakra mandala, which had come to the earth from Shambala according to legend. During the seminar we developed methods for harmonisation of the biosphere And noosphere based on ancient shaman traditions from different corners of our planet, including Siberian and northern American shaman's and Celtic magician's practices. In our activity we used methods of working in altered conditions of consciousness during which we contacted with our colleagues from different regions of our planet and worked together with them. Besides we adopted methods of the ancient Celtic labyrinth magic to our modern conditions for harmonisation and balancing landscape energies and communication with energetic streams of our planet. We also applied landscape Feng Shui for this purpose. One of our tasks was to restore destroyed energetic and informational links between the places of power on our planet. All in all we have built seven labyrinths including magic Celtic and desert Naska labyrinth. We are planning to organise similar expeditions to different places of Russia with wild nature and hold seminars in transpersonal ecological camps. This trip was our first experience. Although conditions of life during the expedition were far from being comfortable everybody would remember this trip for a long time. Love, Evgueni 4. From Russia With Love Again We are fine. Visited holy places around Seliger lake in the middle of Russia, where the Volga river comes from. On August 21 we are going to Vladivostok to give a workshop and also to participate in Dzogchen retreat with our spiritual master Chogyal Namkhai Norbu. Then I'll move to Krasnoyarsk to give 6 days workshop and then will return to Moscow. In Moscow on September 27 - October 1 we will have our annual conference entitled this year: "Mandala of Wholeness: eliminating troubles to spiritual growth and social realization". During the summer I've edited and written introductory papers for three more important transpersonal books I am going to publish soon: ESSENTIAL SPIRITUALITY by Roger Walsh, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE FUTURE by Stanislav Grof, and EYE OF SPIRIT by Ken Wilber. I am also intensively working on the second edition of my book on transpersonal psychology with a new extensive chapter about the transpersonal tradition in Russian culture, and new books on transpersonal psychotherapy and an anthology of transpersonal psychology and psychotherapy. Warmly, Vladimir 5…… And Again When I was in America my new book Techno Feng Shui was published in Moscow. It is devoted to the issue of the adaptation of traditional geomancy to modern conditions, including variable mechanisms of daily use that surround us at home and at work. In the US I was in Austin - the capital of Texas where I had the workshop on techno Feng Shui and worked on The Mystic Universe which is to be published there. Then my American friends and I left for the short expedition to ancient Maya cities in Yucatan peninsular and continental part of Mexico. Certainly, the cities placed away from civilisation close to the Guatemala boundary were the most interesting. In one of them - Bonampak - I found the image of Vajra - the ancient magic resonator common in India, Tibet and China- on one of Maya's wall paintings. Another place -Pyramidal Site Yaxilan has a pyramid that contains the ancient maze which has not been examined so far. There are some empty spaces under its floor, many passages are blocked with stones but one can feel strong streams of air from the gaps between the stones and the walls. This means that underground passages go further. Besides, there is a sculpture on the very top of the biggest pyramid and it surprisingly reminds of Buddha, sitting in lotus position. Unfortunately, the Spaniards had beheaded the figure. All these things prove that Maya were strictly connected with other civilisations of our planet. I've also made a lot of interesting computer scans of variable informational fields and 6 hours of film. Love, Evgueni 6. WWW Eurotas.org The web site is making good progress in its first year thanks to the devoted work of Chris Hall and Palatte design who gave freely of their time to get us set up and Rumold Mol's Expert Committee who suggested it. Now our webmaster, Frank Visser and editor, Beata Bishop have taken over most of the work and we have a website which will increasingly be our key communication. We can show our thanks by providing material. If you have articles which you wish to publish, please send them to both Beata and Frank. We are increasing the number of links to related sites and if your association has not yet a link, please do consider it. I find that I receive a growing number of enquiries about the transpersonal in Europe, many of which can be answered by referring them to the website. Frank can be reached on: f.visser3@chello.nl and Beata on : beatabishop@clara.co.uk Chris wrote a note which was circulated last August. Among other things " So many of you have made so many positive contributions to this site, it would be impossible to thank everyone individually. Instead please let me thank everyone as a whole which will ensure I don't embarrass myself by forgetting anyone. However I must especially reach out to Beata Bishop who has taken on the difficult task of editing the Eurotas site. Her excellence with rhetoric, her attention to detail, and her commitment have made her an invaluable resource to this project. It is our most fervent wish that someone with a good grasp of the internet and with excellent grammatical skills would step forward to act as her assistant and to take on the training that will lead to them inheriting her position as editor. Please speak to any of us if you are interested... Finally Frank Visser who has taken his technical skills and intertwined them with his deep knowledge of the transpersonal world to give us the backbone for the revised site. Before I worked with Frank, I had only the slightest idea of how a transpersonal site should look and feel. His input has opened doors for me but perhaps the best thing is that this is only the beginning. In the next year, we will see the Eurotas site branch off and be viewable in many, many languages. It is an exciting development and will truly present an international face to the world. ..Please, please make the effort to write up something about your association and send it to us. You will notice that the news items and newsletters are constantly being updated. We probably have them up before you receive them in the post. Also there are articles of interest which are now being posted. Should you wish to add something, please note the link on the bottom of the page regarding submissions. It will provide you with full instructions about how to email your copy to Beata and/or Frank." There is also a "members only" section and if you wish to access this please refer to Chris's letter which gives you the user name and password. 7. The Society for Meditation and Research There is interest in developing a EUROTAS Creative Initiative Committee on Meditation and Andrei Gostev and Evgueny Faidych warmly encouraged this in Bad Kissingen. Klaus Engel is very interested too and has written: "
Dear John Drew and friends of EUROTAS,
with the motherlands of meditation, e.g.. India, see conference the cooperation between
the different ways of meditation and the support of empirical studies. put
you on our mailing list. In
the moment we are working on a Yoga Inventory (8 stages of Patanjali)
and prepare a project to breathing (breathing only - f.e. Zen, Vipassana),
soft breathing (some Pranayama), hard breathing (other Pranayamas, Holotropic
breathing). For the communication we organize
also conferences, national and international-the next in Dheradun, India,
Oct.10-12, 2001.For further information see: With
thanks 8 News from Sweden Kirstin
Haraldsdotter send a beautiful card which was a painting by her talented
and lovely son who so tragically died last year. She thanked us all
" for the cards and the phone calls. I very much appreciate the
nourishing caring from you all. ….I will go for a meditation retreat
for some days to gather strength. Wishing you peace and happiness Kerstin." Kerstin asked that Bo Wikstrom should take her place on the EUROTAS Board and of course your Board unanimously co-opted him until our next meeting in Luxembourg. Bo writes:
I want to share that we have had
a first SEN meeting in Sweden. Everybody was excited and loved the sharing
of something new happening. I managed to gather a variety of people
from different schools of Vítor Rodrigues & Sandra
Gonçalves send "best wishes for a wonderful, joyful New
Year - extending to everyone you shall think of, make contact with or
feel about..." They cannot come to Heemstede in January because
Sandra is expecting their baby girl just about now! As usual they
always write with a quotation this time it is Jung "Through knowledge
the unconscious is robbed of its fire." 10 Sue Michaelson from England
Dear John, It was so nice to receive
from you beautiful card with New Year's 12. Frank Visser - Webmaster and Wilberwonder
WILBER
FRIENDS MAILING LIST 13. What is Eurotas? At the Assisi Conference, EUROTAS was asked to explain what it does and the following was put on the notice board and also distributed in printed form. We would appreciate any comments or amendments. " If you are interested in the transpersonal vision and matters European, please read on.
Membership of the Creative Initiative for individuals is currently free. If you would like to be on our mailing list for conferences and newsletters, please write or register on our website. Our next Conference will be from Wednesday evening, 9th May to Saturday 12th May 2001 at the Institute d'Europe in Munsbach, Luxembourg. We build our meetings round Expert Committees, working on such subjects as "The training of European transpersonal therapists", " The transpersonal vision in health, education and management", " Transpersonal Research, "Art and Creativity" and " Consciousness and Society. " Our meetings are opportunities to connect and work with individuals of many European nationalities, all of whom have the common bond of an interest in the transpersonal. Meetings are stimulating, fun and full of new European and transpersonal insights.
EUR0TAS was established 18 years ago with the purpose of providing a European context to bring together different disciplines and viewpoints - among them sciences, spirituality, philosophies and art - to promote a holistic transformation of the human being in body, soul and spirit. Our aim also is to encourage a transpersonal perspective in education, the economy, ecology, politics and other areas of human life and endeavour. As a growing, living, facilitating organisation EUROTAS continues to develop, often standing, along with its member associations as an oasis of peace in a pressurised and hectic world. Free from ethnic, religious or financial constraints, it encourages creativity, love and art and the responsibility of individuals to follow their own paths in the company of like-minded people. There is a constitution and bylaws, a modest administration and a small fee which member associations contribute to help oil the wheels and support the travel expenses of some who would otherwise not be able to meet each year. But what we do is more important than what we are. If you would like to know more or to join us in Luxembourg next May, please email or fax to this address. We look forward to hearing from you." With love The Board and Members of EUROTAS 14. The Assisi Conference. The Assisi Conference in September organised by the Italian Transpersonal Association was an outstanding event. Assisi is such a special place and Laura Boggio Gilot and her team had been preparing it very carefully for some years. A number of EUROTAS members took part. Beata Bishop gave a workshop: "Healing the Inner Child." Tanna Jacubowitz- Mount gave a most moving account of her life and times in Poland in: "No human energy against life: How to transform the energy of conflict and violence into creative energy and coexistence." John Drew gave a paper on: "The Idea of a Spiritual University: Is a fundamental change imminent?" Other EUROTAS members took part and contributed. Tanna was also the EUROTAS representative on the final round table " Anima Mundi- Our Responsibility to the Soul of the World." This Conference which was associated with EUROTAS, brought to mind the special Warsaw EUROTAS Conference which was the first time EUROTAS had been involved in Eastern Europe and the London EUROTAS Conference which was so admirably orchestrated by Ian Gordon Brown, a former President of EUROTAS. He is with us still as an influence on what we are helping to achieve through coordinating European transpersonal activities. Jean Monnet said that "Europe se fait par des petits pas." It is a complex path which we are trying to follow, but a Conference like Assisi makes one realize that whatever the difficulties, the spiritual dimension could probably help Europe to integrate more deeply and fundamentally than the political and economic aspects of our Continent. 15. News from a previous president Marc Luyckx writes: Happy
new year 16 Pia writes from Belgium Eyes
meet how? Of beingness so vast Of
bliss so still Pia . 17. The University of the Spirit Initiative. Sir George Trevelyan in the early days of the Wrekin Trust wrote " it is very clear than many minds are now questing for deeper meaning and a new understanding of the great oneness of life…..we may in a true sense be preparing for what might be called the University of the Spirit." In June, the Trust hosted a Round Table and since there have been a number of developments. Work is continuing on the "Uni-versity for the Spirit." The vision is now taking root as a counterbalance to the prevailing materialistic ethos in education and as a step towards restoring the term "university" to its original meaning as being " turned towards the One." While the development of an agreed mission statement is still in its early stages, its purpose will include finding ways to bring the study and experience of spirituality, the transpersonal, values and ethics, concern for the planet and related issues into the educational system at all levels in a way that enable students and staff to acquire the transdisciplinary wisdom to address the fundamental issues facing humanity. Should you feel inspired to consider involvement in the early stages, do please contact the Wrekin Trust. 20 The Chase, Reigate Surrey RH2 7DH tel/fax +441737 779 386 e-mail: wrekin@cwcom.net Please copy to John Drew who is involved and would also like to suggest a Creative Initiative EUROTAS Committee on the subject. profdrew@eurotas.org 18. Annual Council Meeting of EUROTAS, Luxembourg 10-13 May The Annual Council Meeting will as usual take place at the same time as the Creative Initiative Conference. If there are issues which Council Members would like to raise or indeed interested others would like to have raised, please let us have them as soon as possible so that there can be pre-discussion and preparation. John Drew, Kati Orosz and Mario Simoes having served for three years means that there are four vacancies. All three are eligible for re-election. Bo Wikstrom, who has been co-opted to the Board, is eligible for election. Nominations please for the Board with a proposer and seconder both of whom should be representatives of National Associations. The Draft Agenda: Minutes of Last Meeting, Election of Officers, Amendments to bylaws/ Constitution (if any), Individual Membership of EUROTAS/Creative Initiative, Venue for next meeting, Any Other Business. A full agenda will be circulated after comments have been received Best wishes to all readers and please keep sending you professional and personal notes for the next newsletter. Also send me email addresses of those who might like to have future editions. As ever, Love John |
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