New Spirits – Reading Deleuze in India
Consciousness exists only in connection with other consciousness
Texts on Auroville as a place, a way of life, an experiment in community, and a space of everyday experience in South India.
The Solitude Farm in Auroville is a ‘food forest’. This is one of the few English terms that is difficult to express in German through a compound word (Esswald?). We do not have such a thing, and find it difficult to think about it too. An orchard that we would allow to grow wild with other edible annual plants and shorter-lived plants until we had a dense jungle consisting entirely of edible plants… I am looking for a word for…
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Today I went to a choir session. What happened there was a very intense shared experience. I will try to describe it as objectively as possible. We (about sixty participants) began with breathing exercises, ‘warmed up’ the vocal cords, sounded four-part chords and moved through pitches. The choir director pointed out that we were not here by chance. We were in Auroville because something had drawn us here. I think most people in the room understood what he meant; for…
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Today I was in the Matrimandir for the first time. Six years ago I took a guided tour; that is a prerequisite for going there alone later. It also makes sense to have a rough orientation as to what kind of place it is, how to behave there, what would disturb others. During my Monday meditations in the Zen circle in Bremen, I was often carried here. It was a place of peace and strength. Sometimes it seemed as though…
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Many films feature good hotels in central locations where the political, intellectual, and economic elite meet. I always perceived this as something very elitist, colonial, and power-hungry. What escaped me in the films, and probably was rarely their subject either, is the networking that takes place in such places. Now, the Center Guesthouse in Auroville can hardly be compared to a luxury hotel in a metropolis, although it is a very beautiful place, welcoming, friendly, and making life easy. Rather,…
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My perception changes when I arrive in India. The smell, the sounds, the slowness, the intuition, the acceptance, hope are wonderful things I see. Others may see stench, noise, inefficiency, irrationality and resignation to fate, despair. I think it is this other gaze that allows me to feel at ease in India. So I have had quite wonderful experiences. I have learned that different people have different views of the same things. I learned by going from A to B…
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Auroville was founded in 1968 by Mirra Alfasse. The architect Roger Anger developed its city plan. It is modeled on a cosmic spiral nebula. The land made available to 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 spent my first night sleeping in this forest. The Auroville Center Guest House is a magical…
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I am embarking on an experiment. A city is being built in Auroville. It is dedicated to humanity. It is about exploring consciousness, about spirituality and unity. UNESCO supports the project, the state of India, many people around the world. There is a charter, a plan, many plans, many opinions, progress and difficulties. Nobody is perfect… I am going there to help, and so I do not want to comment now, before arriving there. That would be entirely presumptuous. But…
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