New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India
Consciousness only exists in connection with other consciousness
Auroville was founded in 1968 by Mirra Alfasse. The architect Roger Anger developed the city plan for it. It is based on a cosmic spiral nebula. The land that was provided for Auroville was a dry plateau. A forest has been planted since the early years. There is a beautiful, slow documentary about it (Ever Slow Green (2020) – S.O.S. from Auroville (now), 2021.) Now I have slept my first night in this forest. The Auroville Center Guest House is a magical place. There is...
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On a boulevard in Paris, a café and bad music, sun and many people. So many people want to be seen. They present themselves as busy, sexy, cool, knowledgeable, adventurous, athletic, educated, cultured, or indifferent. Many want others to notice them. They see this as who they want to be. Perhaps they live their lives in a certain way, happy and content, or externally influenced and bored, outcast or privileged. That's the beauty of Paris and other big cities, that people...
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Yesterday, after many years, I finally drove to the village center of Roubion. Vilém Flusser lived here for many years. I often quoted his books in my seminars and used them as a basis for discussion. Especially his philosophy of photography. Flusser is a wild theorist. He wrote a lot about images, media, language, technology, signs, history... It seems to me that he repeatedly thought about how thinking works. How do words and images arise in our heads and how much does that have to do with...
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What should I take with me to India? I want to live a different life, in a different society, with different ideas and goals. It's warm there, life will be simple. Besides the basics like a few pieces of clothing, I need my tech gadgets like a laptop, phone, and camera. And what else? A good flashlight, because the dirt roads there are not lit. And books... There will be a number of libraries there too. I haven't had any ‚fun‘ for a very long time...
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I've been waiting for a while. I actually enjoy waiting. Waiting is a space and a time in which there's nothing else to do but wait for time to pass. Usually, you can't do much else besides read or talk, or think. For me, waiting times are therefore always free spaces. I most enjoy waiting in community centers, for example; here, all people are equal. Together with others, I'm in a room where there's nothing...
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Highways have always been special places for me. Most of the time, I wasn't under time pressure; I rarely had to get from A to B by a certain time. Rather, highways are travel routes. I find myself in transitional states there, a kind of no-man's-land with endless possibilities. That opens up room for thought. Often, these rooms are simply empty. The brain is busy navigating safely in traffic. It's a pleasant form of occupation; consciousness is occupied and alert, a mistake would be fatal. When I...
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Life is so complex, and there are so many different ways to live. There is no right or wrong way to live. Life is a gift. But what do you say about the negative energies, destruction and aggression, greed and envy? All of that is part of it. There is only acceptance. But acceptance doesn't mean approving of everything, nor does it mean tolerating everything. If a community decides to establish rules and penalize the violation of those rules, then…
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I've always had stomachaches with an atomistic worldview. We learn in school that the smallest building blocks of the universe are atoms. Now, physics has advanced, and we talk about protons, electrons, positrons, quarks, and strings, etc. ... At its core, the idea remains the same: the world is composed of the smallest parts of matter. This is such a widespread idea that few people doubt it, meaning they doubt the exclusivity of this worldview. I explicitly do not want to [cover] physics, chemistry, or...
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