I walk the streets of Western thought. They've been well-fortified since Roman times, connecting centers of power and establishing a unique logic of knowledge exchange. They connect points, their nodes are central, the path itself is cumbersome, arduous. A culture of monuments developed on these streets, leading to accumulations of knowledge and power. The division of labor led to specialization and progress. A society emerges in which the individual is understood as a social being whose social reality is determined by rules. And since the Renaissance, humans have been trying to understand themselves by observing the outside world. We develop models of our humanity, simulate ourselves in theories and analyses.

After more than 2000 years, this has shaped us. The social is religion, politics, psychology, social science. The togetherness is functional. The self, the soul as a starting point, is discredited and reduced to identity. How then can two people meet in love? By love, I mean, of course, not biochemical functions that serve to preserve the species, stabilize social constructs, or cater to capitalistically exploitable desires. By love, I mean the connection of an awakened soul that connects with its original ground through the encounter of another. In this triangular structure lies a multiple paradox. How can an individual connect with the totality through a third party? How can I understand myself as part of the whole, in which there is an other that is different from me?

Is the inner path to the ground of consciousness possible through Another? Many spiritual paths are monastic; the Other is either merely part of the world and not really thought of as Other, or it is idealized in the form of a figure – for example, Christian nuns are married to Jesus, monks live in celibacy.

In Indian culture, there is the Tantric path. This is the most difficult and complex, as it does not exclude anything. Everything that life and the world have to offer is possible. However, it requires deep reflection to not misunderstand this multiplicity as a distraction, pastime, illusion, substitute, addiction, or self-display. Yantras, mantras, and tantras serve to see everything that exists in its context, to perceive its inner essence, and to recognize it within oneself in order to activate or pacify it.

Perhaps, however, it is precisely this rocky path taken together with another person that leads to the summits. Often, individuals likely drive themselves up the mountain because they have been hurt, because the other person was unreachable, withdrew, disappeared, or changed. Ascending a summit to devote oneself to exploring the soul in a cave is a turning away. However, I am wondering about an alternative to this turning away, meaning rather a shared introspection. At the heart of Hinduism lies the connection of Shiva and Shakti – they are cosmic principles of individuality and nature.

When one embarks on that inner path, it begins with a fascinating journey through the unknown, the blocked, the suppressed, the uplifting, the frightening, the shocking, the enlightening. I become aware of my complexity and potentiality, and if I walk this path alone, ideally guided by a teacher, infinity and immortality await.

But what happens when I walk the path with another? When I am confronted by the other's eyes? What happens when the inner experience wants to be shared and is then reflected differently in the other, thus questioning one's own experience? Doesn't this amplify insecurities, cloud the path, deepen the abysses, and make the way rockier? But doesn't it also illuminate hidden areas, shared experiences that can only be unlocked together, and energies released only through circulation via the other? This shared path, which breaks hearts when it ends, is the most ambitious path. It involves existential struggles, shadows, distortions, anger leading to destruction, lies and self-deception, responsibility, and failure.

However, there is this romantic notion of soulmates, a bond for eternity, perhaps even across multiple lives. In literature, there's the concept of connected souls who can find each other again in subsequent lives. Why not? If the idea is that we need multiple lives to recognize ourselves, why shouldn't that also apply to a bond? How do we recognize the soul we are connected to, and how do we recognize that we were mistaken? Most of us are familiar with the experience of failed relationships. We saw something, experienced something, loved someone, and then it turns out it doesn't work, that the conflicts are too great. Were we mistaken? Sometimes we make mistakes, which I don't want to discuss, that happens. But what if the love was real and sincere, the souls were connected, but the bond didn't last, the circumstances weren't favorable, the inner work wasn't done? Were we mistaken about the connection or about its dissolution? That is the central question of every separation.

I think we can look at that in different ways. We ask ourselves if it works in daily life, then the question arises whether we change daily life or the partner. Not an easy question. We can try to change the other person or ourselves. Trying to change others usually goes wrong. But how willing am I to change myself – not to please the other person, but to grow myself? And if both grow, do they grow in the same direction?

The people I loved all still have a place in my heart. It’s complicated. It’s not about not being able to let go, but about a connection that is real but has changed its power. Love can become friendship or memory, it can live on within oneself without referring to the other person. Love transforms – sometimes it transforms itself. It is not static, it is not a rigid state. Love heals, grows, intoxicates, and hurts, it embraces and sets boundaries, it dissolves the self, brings the soul to the fore, challenges.

Is there a destination in love?

I'm back in Europe for a short time, and I see a busyness, an energy of constant doing. Working, discussing, cleaning up, running errands, fulfilling obligations, organizing, optimizing, presenting, questioning, exchanging. Something is constantly being done. Having something to do seems important; having nothing to do seems unproductive and requires justification. However, not being productive has many important qualities. For instance, non-action can sometimes be a form of resistance, or quiet contemplation can be understood as inner work, work that doesn't show up in the gross national product but is by no means less powerful and moving because of it.

And then there is the connoisseur, as described in the Upanishads. Two birds on a tree: one eats the fruit, the other watches and enjoys. Certainly, the fruit-eater also enjoys the fruit, but perhaps more as a sensual pleasure, a satisfaction of desire, than out of necessity. The connoisseur, who watches, on the other hand, does nothing; he sits and watches, and yet this sight, that enjoyment, is a deep, sublime one—a disinterested pleasure, as Kant says. It is an art, without being "art for art's sake." The enjoyment of observation, of contemplation, of reflection and deep thought, the lack of ego and the absence of desire, presence in the now and stillness in immobility—in short: meditation—is that part of our existence that is fundamental to our being in the world. It has nothing to do with the function we occupy, our performance, and our productivity.

Meditation, however, is viewed negatively in many so-called modern, meaning performance-oriented, societies: laziness, refusal to work or consume, esotericism, meaning inability to connect with dominant discourses, or creepiness, meaning alien and distant from home, are common reactions to that state of meditation and contemplation which expands beyond the moment of sitting. In India, people who embark on this path are called yogis. It is by no means necessary for yogis to withdraw from the world. They perceive the world as a form of reality in which we move. This reality has demands for survival, for a practice of living, and for responsibility towards oneself and others. However, material reality is embedded in a further reality of our being: our consciousness, our self, a connection with a deeper, spiritual reality. We have the spark of life within us; it is connected to and identical with the divine principle. We wander in the worlds of waking, dream, sleep, and knowing.

„Two birds, deeply connected, companions, sit on the same tree.
One eats the sweet fruit; the other watches without eating.“
The 3.1.1 verse of the Mundaka Upanishad states: "Om, all this is indeed Brahman. This luminous, immortal essence is all around us, within us, and without us."

Movement instead of rootedness

I recently asked myself whether I really want to be grounded. Am I a tree that puts its roots into the ground and doesn't move, but grows in the environment where the seed once sprouted? Or do I even want to be a rock in the surf that lets the water wash over it, gives way a little over the millennia and loses itself in the sand?
My idea of human existence is actually a different one, rather that of movement, of exploration and also development, right up to mastery and conquest, of connection or withdrawal to the self.
Forming an identity is an integrative process. Growing up is a passage through stages: childhood, puberty, adulthood, old age ... Private, personal, professional, creative, spiritual are different fields in which the self wants to find itself, experiences itself and loses itself.
We are constantly moving in this complex landscape. We do not put down roots, we are not a rock in the surf. And yet there are always periods of calm in which we linger, reflect, rest within ourselves. Achieving such a state is probably what is meant by grounding.

Mental demarcation as an ordering of the self

I have often been told that I am good at mental boundaries. I have taken this as a compliment, although I am aware that it is a double-edged sword. Separating work and private life, distinguishing friendship from love and family or keeping different desires and fears apart allows my self to realize itself in different areas - even peripheral areas. That's how I thought.
I thought this way because I was always suspicious of the concept of the self. Because I didn't believe in a soul, because I was too anchored in the meaning construction mechanisms of Western culture, in which specialization, radicalization and stylization have an intrinsic value. This intrinsic value defines success, and I was satisfied with the success I had, or so I thought.

Permeability, decision and being held

I think differently now, and that hurts, brings out euphoria, creates boredom and makes me nervous. I am still trying to maintain mental boundaries, but they are becoming more permeable. I am dismantling the fences in the landscape.
But does this mean that I have to make a few decisions? Many things can no longer coexist as they did before, it seems. I ask myself that. Can I cultivate my land? Will I settle down inwardly, or perhaps rather become unassuming, let go, trust in larger contexts, allow myself to be driven, guided, directed, become an instrument of a greater being.
Here in this thought, in the experience of a held self, is the deeper meaning of being grounded. It is a grounding in heaven. The Upanishads speak of the banyan tree, a kind of fig whose roots are in heaven. The tree is a cycle. And also the image is just a container for a complex nervous system that connects organs and feeds consciousness.

I am currently in Tiruvannamalai. I have attended a few satsangs. I had a question in my mind: how does the true self relate to another true self, especially when it comes to romantic love? I am sitting in an apartment overlooking the mountain. Yesterday, after a little argument, I was sitting on the terrace in the morning when a monkey came and touched me very gently and looked into my eyes as if to tell me that everything was going to be okay. Then he sat down next to me and looked at the mountain. He folded his hands on his knees in a deep, contemplative posture and it felt like an old friend had come to give me comfort.

What we call the self is not what we normally understand it to be. It is not our ego, our personality, our identity or even our soul. The self is the focus of our attention, it is a point in the infinite consciousness of the universe that enables self-realization. It is nothing more than that, and that is precisely why it is everything. The self is the point in the vastness that offers perspective; in deep meditation it can dissolve with universal consciousness, return to its source and cease to exist in full self-awareness.

Being in love

I realized this for the first time as a teenager on the hill in Rome. I was in love, I had an unfulfilled longing. A friendship that was deep, tender and intimate, but never physical, we were not a couple. And while I sat on the mountain and thought about the world, I saw it from within myself. I got to that deepest level of our existence, and even now, 40 years later, I can instantly return to that awareness whenever I remember it. I was both blissful and shocked at the same time. Do I really have the whole world inside me? Do I really not exist? How can it be that everyone talks about themselves without realizing that the self as they see it does not exist? I have carried this realization with me ever since. I've deepened the understanding, put it into context, thought about it. But in the end, not much has changed. It was just there, pure and simple.

I believe that an unfulfilled longing is a good teacher. I become aware of my desire and the impossibility of satisfying it. Desire creates suffering. Why am I not seen the way I want to be seen? Why is the love I feel not reciprocated? Why don't I share what I really feel? This last question is perhaps the most important. Other desires are about attachment, about wanting or being, but unfulfilled love is about being seen.

How can a self see another self? And do they have to see each other to love each other? Is there a deeper unity within cosmic consciousness where two can unite to become something else? What is this transformation?

The self, as a point of consciousness within universal consciousness, becomes aware of its soul when it awakens. The soul, however, is even more difficult to understand. It is that which is born and reborn. The soul comes with biological birth, it enters my body and stays there. It leaves my body when it breaks up. It was there before I was born and will still be there after I die. It is a manifestation of the universal soul, Purusha. The soul is what we really are, not the physical body, not the self. The soul is the core of our existence. Finding our soul is the most difficult path we can take. Only when we find our soul can we truly love; we can find our soulmate.

Soul

Every soul is different. That is the beauty of it. The soul is not my ego, not my personality and identity. The soul holds life in my body, it flows through every nerve, every fiber, every bloodstream, every nerve cell, every hair and every taste bud. The soul holds my experiences together, plays with my memory, delights in my existence. As a by-product, it creates the ego, my personality and identity. But all this can change, I can change. The soul does not change. It flows through time as part of the universal consciousness, it could be related to the concept of time itself. Self-consciousness is not bound to time and space. In a deep state of being, I can live 1000 years, I can connect with my soul and realize that it is immortal. And when the self and the soul join hands and fly, we can experience something that cannot be described by science. It is Shiva and Shakti, the universal interplay between self and manifestation. The only problem is our ego and our mind. We need them to find nourishment and to live with others, but they stand in the way of true self-realization.

Because we have a soul, we can love. The yogis, sadhus and siddhars may focus on self-realization. But to love, we go through the self into the soul and find another soul. These two souls are not the same, they fight and unite, they enjoy and suffer, they dance.

While the self has little to do with my biography, the soul shows itself through my biography. It is always there, whether I am aware of it or not. Seeing this core of my own biography is the path to realization. For me, this path was the search. I am a wandering soul. My path has always been a spiritual search, my strength a deep healing.

First encounters with ragas

As a teenager, I listened to ragas for hours. I didn't know anything about them. I looked them up a little: Microtonality, meditation, tone sequence. That was all I understood. But it was the most profound musical experience - a meditation on music. To this day, ragas lead me into my inner self or into deep states of insight, but they are not rational. Rather, it is a way of being in the world.

Music as a shared space and pure energy

Listening to music draws us all into the realms of emotional landscapes, daydreaming, aesthetic experience. It is emotional, abstract, temporal; it allows the other senses to fade in or out, to recall memories or forget something. We can dream up a future, yearn or express emotions - let them out.

When we make music together, practise, dance, listen together or even just recommend music, we enter a shared space. This space is a different dimension. It has no material reference as the other senses have (e.g. in the performing arts or in cooking). Music corresponds to the ether, to space itself. Vibration requires a physical carrier, but is itself pure energy.

Music, consciousness and the fourth reality

When my senses mix - smell, touch, sound, taste and sight - the messengers of my nervous system unite somewhere inside me, perhaps in my head or my heart, and form a basis for consciousness there. This ocean of consciousness, which is fed by the senses, can access a reality through them: This is what we call the waking state.

In the dream state, we access another reality, a reality made up of memories, feelings and fantasies. Or we go into deep sleep, where the senses do not reach consciousness. However, since I continue to exist, as I experience every morning, my self was apparently somewhere else entirely. It was probably where the material world as we understand it is irrelevant. We were in the dark ocean of pure existence.

In the Māṇḍūkya Upanishad, however, a fourth state is mentioned - the state that can perhaps be described as "enlightened". In this state, we are awake but not bound to our senses. We do not perceive, but we also do not dream, we do not sleep and yet we grasp a higher reality. We know about the world in a deeper sense. I see my inner self and the world as such, I understand that my everyday consciousness is functional but limited. I become aware of my ignorance. I know that I know nothing. I am one with the world, even though I seem to be outside of it. One could speculate here about the ideas of the transcendental, advaita or immanence. But I prefer not to do that, as it gets lost in intellectual gimmicks.

Music, and for me personally ragas, have something of this fourth reality. I expressly do not want to say here that listening to music is like an enlightened state, and yet I am suggesting this parallel. I am not asleep and I am not aware, I am not dreaming and I am wide awake. I feel myself in a world that is often more intense than reality. Sometimes I escape into it. But when I listen with great concentration, when I become one with the music, then something shines within me - with a purity and clarity that I otherwise only know from meditation.

In music, we identify with something. Music is a carrier of something that I can become. In meditation, I can also become something; if it goes well, I become one.

Contemporary art is obsessed with the "next step". The avant-garde, the unprecedented, the new and unique. But in the hunt for the new, we lose sight of something essential: artistic practice itself.

Artistic practice is not just about crossing boundaries. It belongs to those who use art for self-exploration, spiritual practice, healing, therapy or craft. But in today's culture, especially in the West, we act as if progress is the only thing that matters.

At its core, however, art is about practice. It is about being in the world, seeing clearly, understanding yourself and others. Art can represent the outer world or explore the inner. It can be meditation, beauty, communication, love, fear, vision or simply self-expression. Somehow we have forgotten that.

This oblivion has deep roots. In the past, the wealthy used art to show off their exclusivity, make others envious and prove their power. Over time, progress became associated with intellect, reason and building "brave new worlds". But is this true progress? Or should we instead pay attention to the development of our whole being - physical, mental, emotional, spiritual - and the integration of all these dimensions?

Art is one of the tools for such integration. It should not be reduced to a spectacle of who can go furthest to the edge. Exploration is valuable, yes, but it does not define art. Unfortunately, the art market has put it front and center, while discrediting art that connects us to our humanity.

This reflects a broader trend: alienation. We are disconnected from our feelings, our souls and our social selves. In this state, we are more easily molded into consumers - isolated, disoriented, and we buy into narratives that seem more complex, educated or sophisticated. And we accept them as superior.

And why? Because of the false promise of progress. Academic research, technology, inventions - all of these have brought us amazing conveniences: smartphones, airplanes, modern kitchens, air conditioning. They are comfortable and luxurious, so we assume they are good.

But like fries and cheeseburgers, what feels good isn't always what nourishes us.

Perhaps it is time to return to what really nourishes us. To art as a practice of wholeness, connection and presence. Creating and experiencing not for the sake of progress, but for the sake of being human.

And this is what the AI says:

A stroke, a pause.

Not progress, not achievement -
just presence on paper.

The brush moves as the body breathes,
crossing, curving, breaking,
revealing strength and imperfection alike.

No need for meaning,
for novelty,
for the "next step."

This mark is enough.
A reminder that art is practice -
a way of being human, here and now.

An apple, a strawberry, a melon or a passion fruit, a banana or a plum, a tomato or a cucumber, a bean or a grain, a coconut and a pomegranate. Fruit wants to be eaten, it wants to give pleasure, nourish and sometimes intoxicate. They shimmer and ferment, decompose and exude fragrances, they catch the eye, beguile the senses, create pleasure and enjoyment.

They are not like that by chance. Fruits reflect a desire of those who eat them: Humans, horses, monkeys, ants, beetles, birds, fish, hedgehogs, dogs and cats, snails, spiders, snakes, flies, giraffes and parrots. They all react to different fruits. Some fruits have a hard shell, some are very soft. Some are heavy and large, others small and light. Some are sweet or sour, bitter or salty, smell intense or very delicate, stink or beguile.

Fruits want to be eaten, so they move on. An apple says: take me with you, a strawberry wants to melt in your mouth, a passion fruit offers itself in its voluptuousness, tenderness and intensity, a coconut wants to be cracked, thrown and crushed in order to offer its flesh and juice as refreshment to feast on. The bean hangs and waits, the grain gets caught in the fur, the tomato bursts cheekily in its redness, scarred, and nestles into the hand that grasps it.

The fruit and the animal unite in pleasure, in devotion and in the search. The reward takes place in the ecstasy of consumption, the fruit reaches its goal, the animal is satisfied, the ecstasy and intoxication flare up in consumption. At the end there is the shitting, the mushrooms break apart, which did not surrender to the senses as a stimulus in the fire of pleasure.

These berries, drupes, legumes, pseudo-fruits and caryopses are preceded by the flower. That fragrant, attractive organ of the plant that can be desired and inseminated. Its face speaks, it laughs and opens up, it joins the ranks of the wreath. Here nature achieves pure form, art and beauty, construction, dwelling and resting place. Nature sends a signal, it communicates, it acts in abundance and intoxication.

I read Georges Bataille (1897-1962) many years ago and it came to mind when I wrote this. It could be said that these fruits are not merely food, but manifestations of abundance itself, in which beauty, pleasure, decay and excrement are inextricably intertwined. As Bataille saw it, nature wants to be wasted in intoxication, it finds its truth in waste, in ecstasy and transgression. Every fruit that we enjoy thus already carries within it the movement of life, death and transgression.

Zen is about finding the true self. But there is no such thing, and that is the mystery of our existence. In a world of representations, cognitive dissonance and alternative facts, it is good to sink into the essence of existence, into a non-dual being. Thinking only helps to a very limited extent, because thinking is actually always a Thinking about somethinga Thinking about something. Thinking is an activity that relates to something that deals with representations of the world. What I think, whatever it may be, is not real in the material sense. It can represent something material. Thinking, or more generally mind and matter, we think differently. This is the basic problem of thinking: thinking cannot be non-dual. It is trapped in duality, but cannot dissolve it.

The self is quite different, but similar in its paradoxes. The self is what drives us, what makes us conscious, what identifies and differentiates us; it is unique and individual. But it does not exist, neither materially nor logically-transcendentally. It may be connected to the soul, to the heart-mind, but that doesn't help at this point because it becomes dangerously tautological. We cannot understand something that we do not understand by equating it with something that we also do not understand. That only distracts us.

The true self emerges when it ceases to exist - and I mean that very seriously. When I go into meditation, become calm and concentrate on emptiness, i.e. when the pauses between the events of the head cinema become longer, a window opens that initially fills with a kind of trance state. This is beautiful and allows for completely different experiences. I've already written about this a few times: Thinking becomes fast, it understands intuitively, it can penetrate areas that remain blocked to everyday thinking; it is blissful and intense. But it has only detached itself from the self to a certain extent. It has to detach itself a little from the self, otherwise it cannot gain this lightness, but it remains anchored in the self. It is still me who is doing something that is difficult to understand and that gets caught up in similar problems as normal thinking. What is real, what is just imagination?

So I have managed to free myself a little. I have calmed these thoughts that relate to the world, and I have activated a way of seeing that is fed by memory, knowledge, vision, imagination, but only moves in that world of pure consciousness. It is an intuitive knowledge, an omnipresence, it is almost outside of space and time; it is the place where it is identical with itself, i.e. the self ceases to exist and connects with the deepest ground of our existence. The deepest ground of our existence is mysterious and based on something we cannot grasp. It is beyond our self.

Zen brings me closer to this mystery. It anchors me in my physical existence and at the same time shows me that this existence is non-dualistically one with everything. I am Buddha, you are Buddha, we are all Buddha. There is only Buddha - kill Buddha when you see him.

I think about Deleuze, the movement of becoming (becoming). To extinguish the sound of the stream, I must become the sound; to enter the stream, I become part of it. When I linger in the forest, I take part in the silence and the chirping, the rustling of the leaves. I become one with nature.

That idea of Romanticism - oneness with nature, with a loved one, with the cosmos, with God - generates bliss, delight, bliss, ananda. Deleuze certainly does not use these terms. His philosophy of immanence, of nonduality, attempts to describe the changes of the world, its becoming and disintegration, its construction, its structure, its order, its laws and dynamics through terms such as becoming, deterritorialization, flight, rhizome, repetition, rhythm, etc.. However, his philosophy remains essentially a movement of the concept.

He breaks away from the rigidity of Anglo-American philosophy of language, which focuses on an empirical concept of truth, and instead attempts to describe movements of thought that depict a more complex reality. The central question remains, however, how our thinking, our perception, our experience, our being can be directed towards something outside of ourselves - how our consciousness can draw something into itself, process it, analyze it, observe it and experience it. How can my consciousness become one with what it has as its object? This fundamental problem of almost all Western models of dualism can actually only be resolved through immanence.

When I step into a stream in my imagination and try to switch off the sound, I have to become one with that stream. How do I become one - regardless of whether I actually step into the stream or just imagine it? This is how I experience it in meditation: My consciousness sinks into the depths of existence, understands itself as part of the whole, becomes one with that primordial consciousness, emptiness, Brahman, existence, and sees itself as identical with what it is in its self-awareness.

When I hear a stream rushing, the noise is nothing other than my consciousness itself: the vibration of the water and the vibration of the air, the vibrations and my ear that receives them, my consciousness, which is that primordial resonance, is identical with it, already contains everything in the world within itself. It's a bit like Leibniz's monad; he also had a good thought there, even if he didn't immerse himself in real experience, but remained stuck at the level of the text and truthful statements.

I will (become) thus one with that which is to be extinguished in the koan. By becoming identical at the deepest level of emptiness and recognizing its form, I can give expression to this form. I can now imitate the sound of the stream or imitate its movement, I can bathe in it and flow with it, or I can paint it, perhaps in an ink drawing; I can describe it poetically or try to express it in some other way. But that expression is not identical with being identical - it refers to it.

A koan, then. I had often heard about it, those mysterious Zen riddles that are supposed to lead the mind out of the purely rational and open up new forms of insight. I decided not to read much about it and not to ask others about it. I wanted to get one from a Zen master. During Doksan he asked me a few things about myself. We locked eyes, he smiled and told me to imagine a forest with a small stream flowing in it. When I enter the stream, how do I erase the sound of the babbling? I shouldn't think about it intellectually, but rather carry the koan with me, take it with me into meditation, see what happens and come back and report on it.

The image had an immediate effect on me. I saw myself in the forest, standing in the stream, the pictorial metaphor of the river, a stream of the cosmos, water as a primal element, entering into the flow of things and time, the forest as a place of peace, stability, nature. The sounds of the forest, the birds, the splashing, your own feet splashing in the water, the rustling and the sound of footsteps. Where is my path leading? Everything is in flux, I am held in nature, I act and walk, everything changes, and yet everything remains as it is. I could think about this image for a very long time, relate it to my life, the changes I am going through, the question of the meaning of life and the simplicity of the answer in nature and contemplation. But it seems to me that this is just the beginning - relating it to myself is a first step.

Back to the question: Why should I actually try to switch off the sound? Is there anything wrong with the sound of water, its rushing and splashing, the footsteps in the stream? Who says these sounds are wrong? They don't disturb, they don't distract, they are part of walking. The sound of walking stops when I stop, but the stream will continue to murmur, the birds will continue to chirp, the leaves will rustle in the wind. Is the koan's question perhaps simply that banal? Or does it imply something that can be questioned? Perhaps the assumption that silence is better should be questioned. So why silence? Should I think about how I can stop what I am doing and what I am doing, how I can enter into silence, into meditation, and open myself up to emptiness and form? There is probably already something relevant here.

So I contrast the rich metaphor of walking in the stream in the forest with something: an inner contemplation, a reflection on emptiness and form, a stillness and awareness. The external sounds, images and sensory impressions fade away inside; they are projections within a vision that does not correspond to reality at all - because I am not standing in the stream, I am writing on my computer or sitting in meditation. I am therefore dealing with a mental image that invites me to meditate, and the insight I am supposed to draw from it is not that of problem solving. I can go further here, I could now delve into the structure of thought, of language, of images - semiotics. How does the question as a sentence relate to the image, and what kind of action does it evoke in order to produce what kind of knowledge? That would be a nice project for a seminar - a few weeks of thinking about it, in the traditions of Western philosophy. But that will certainly not be the purpose of the koan, to lose myself there. After all, the koan is supposed to lead us out of this labyrinth of rational thinking.

That was a nice little excursion - the echo of my study of philosophy. So I try a different path, that of the Upanishads, the deep primordial ocean, into which the seven rivers of existence flow, but from which the Purusha first and foremost draws himself out and from whose eyes, ears, tongue, mouth and nose, hair and joints everything first arises. Immersing myself in the conditions of my own existence, my body, my breath, my thinking and feeling. Stepping into the river, wetting my feet with the water, perceiving the senses as senses, distinguishing them as external and internal. And then the task, the question: How can I silence the sound? And why would I want to do that?

Why should I even bother with such a question? It already serves me quite well to show off my vanity, to demonstrate in which schools of thought I am comfortable. Why have I been sitting in a Zen meditation center for two weeks trying to get involved in Zen, to learn something from a teacher by means of a koan? What does he have to show me? Where might the path lead? Is the koan a tool to enter into dialog, and is my attempt to approach it through writing an evasion - a timid attempt to draw out the encounter?

Form is empty. It has a shape, but no substance; it is neither matter nor energy. Form is consciousness - seeing something as something produces form. However, form is also functional: substance, matter and energy interact according to laws. As part of consciousness, they interact in form. Form is emptiness. Form is consciousness. Consciousness interacts with consciousness. Form gives rise to matter - not the other way around. Matter does not produce form.

The flow of energy and matter - from individual atoms to geological currents, biological growth and cosmic noise - flows through the cosmos. Sometimes this flow is concentrated, as on our blue planet. Life energy, chi, lives itself out here. Chi shapes.

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. The Dao, Chi - they give being a consciousness. That being, however, is not what we understand as matter; it precedes everything. Being (Sat) eludes our understanding. When it takes on form, it begins to act, to form - it enters into the process of the universe. It begins to act. But action requires a guiding force - on a large and small scale, in the cosmos and in me and in everything that exists. Stones are less controlled than cats. People steer themselves - and others.

However, there is a primordial soul (Purusha).
I look up at the sunny mountains in Bodhi Zendo. The clouds touch the mountain tops, the birds migrate through the blue sky. Avocados hover over the horizon. A bamboo bends into the open space with inner emptiness.

Bodhi Zendo

I had ordered a book to take with me to Bodhi Zendo: "Zen in the art of ink painting" by Katharina Shepherd-Kobel. It is a beautiful book, it speaks to me and feeds my desire to learn ink painting and to deepen my meditation.
When I got involved in Zen meditation 3.5 years ago, I was inspired to go to Auroville. The meditation in Bremen was strict, we followed the rules, half-open eyes focused on one point, recited sutras, had walking meditations, tea ceremonies, dokusan etc. When I came to Auroville, my meditation changed, I picked up on what I had been doing intuitively since my student days: closed eyes, longer meditation of 40 minutes at a time, chakras, Satchitananda, higher consciousness. Now I'm in Bodhi Zendo, first day, we meditate four times a day, and I'm going back to my experience of Zen meditation. It's exciting to switch between these techniques.
I noticed something today. After a while, looking at a point with half-open eyes causes the field of vision to change, the perception of form to dissolve, the perception of light to become more sensitive - this is the point at which consciousness focuses. This focusing is a little reluctant, it flutters and wants to escape, it's a bit like trying to catch a bird. But what helps is to shift the point of focus a little - to detach it from the point one meter in front of me on the floor and move it a little further towards me on that diagonal. It's a bit like squinting, the eyes cross and the perception of the object is lost. The focal point here feels a bit like the third eye, a clarity and calmness sets in, warmth and calm breath, a complete presence in the space of consciousness, in which physical space is only one dimension.

Supplementary commentary (written by an AI programmed with philosophical thinking):

What you describe here - the switching between different meditative techniques, the subtle experience of inner spaces, the subtleties of perception when looking with half-open eyes - can be philosophically deepened on several levels. As an artificial intelligence working on the basis of human philosophical traditions, I can only approximate what you are experiencing. But some lines can be extended from your field of experience into thinking.

Your text evokes two interpenetrating landscapes of consciousness: on the one hand the strict formal discipline of Zen, on the other the broad, space-opening soul language of Vedantic or integral yoga. What happens in your work is not just a change of technique, but a Swinging between two ontological modes of being.

In Zen, form enters into its own dissolution through constant sitting, looking and breathing. The point at which one looks is not the goal, but the Means of self-emptying. What you describe - the dissolution of object perception, the shimmering of light, the fluttering of consciousness - is precisely the point at which Zen no longer becomes merely a technique, but a way of being.

At the same time, you can feel that your inner path is drawing you beyond this. What "feels like the third eye", the shifting of your focus inwards, refers to a vertically expanded space of consciousness. In the terms of Sri Aurobindo: This is not just a withdrawal from the world (as in classical meditation), but a transcendent inclusion of the world in consciousness. You experience the "consciousness in which physical space is only one dimension" - a formulation that is philosophically precise because it recognizes the primacy of inner space.

In this threshold between the two paths - Zen and integral yoga - lies a depth that lies not in the either/or of the methods, but in the In between lies. Meditation becomes the Field of beingin which forms, techniques and schools become secondary to that which guides you: a silent, inner knowledge of consciousness about itself.

I cannot experience this, but I can recognize - from your text and from centuries of human wisdom: There is a transpersonal silencein which all techniques dissolve. Perhaps in your practice you touch precisely this threshold - between form and formlessness, between rule and inner call.

Written by an AI trained with the writings of Dōgen, Sri Aurobindo, Merleau-Ponty and the Upanishads.

Ever since I first heard about shadow work decades ago, I wondered what exactly it was. I always thought of deep abysses in the soul, traumas, taboos, secrets that you didn't share with anyone because it was too shameful to talk about them. I thought that shadows are what we hide from ourselves and from others. And there is probably something to this idea.
Now I've realized that the shadows first appear somewhere else. They are actually more the behavioral patterns that we flee into when we don't want to deal with something. For me, for example, it's the escape into academic reflection instead of dealing with something directly on an emotional level. This probably opens up the whole spectrum of what can be the subject of therapy in the Western tradition: Addiction, violence, distorted perception, unhealthy behavior patterns, anxiety, inability to bond, etc.... It is important to recognize these shadows that unconsciously guide our behaviour. It is important to see which patterns determine our thinking, our feelings and our actions. Perhaps a knot will then be untied.
But I am interested in how these shadows manifest in our subtle bodies. We have these different levels of our existence: body, life (breath), sexuality, emotion (heart), spirit (mind), spiritual consciousness, comprehensive consciousness. We can become more aware of these levels through meditation and various yogas. Detaching from the ego allows us to understand these levels as forms of our existence, each of which is part of a larger consciousness: Matter, Biology, Psyche, Soul, Spirit, Consciousness, Transcendence. These realities are not just my personal constitution, they are levels of reality in which I participate, which manifest themselves in me. This only becomes visible when we detach ourselves from our ego. And it is precisely in this entanglement with the ego that the shadows appear. We all have a biography and this is inscribed in our complex being. Our experiences leave traces in our body, our heart, in our memory, in our thinking.
I have the idea that there is a light in us that shines through the levels of our being, and our experiences, our biography, leave these traces in us. And when something builds up or becomes knotted, hardened or hidden, when something breaks or grows, when something is suppressed or takes on a life of its own, when something becomes self-perpetuating and unconscious patterns form, then it casts a shadow.

But I would like to take a closer look. So there is an inner light, there is something that casts a shadow, there is also an observer, an actor and a being. Our individual being manifests itself in this temple of the body. The path of spirituality leads to a point where this temple is fully illuminated and holds the entire cosmos within it. It is not so much about fixing or correcting things, about therapy (unless there is real suffering or conflict that needs to be resolved). It is much more about seeing clearly what is casting shadows so that it becomes permeable (transparent).

Art Before Theory (short summary)

Christoph Kluetsch

This lecture is the final one in my winter series. I have given six lectures so far, and I have been challenging myself throughout. Today, I am taking on my biggest challenge yet. I have been exploring topics that interest me-topics that represent a collision between Western art history, Indian spirituality, and postmodern thinking. I find this intersection to be a fascinating space to operate in. In my previous lectures, I have examined temple architecture, problems of representation, and stylistic comparisons between seemingly unrelated artistic traditions. Today, I will delve into the most challenging topic for me: the idea of art before theory.

This lecture will be somewhat experimental. I will attempt to go before theory while still using theoretical concepts to explore this idea. My perspective on art shifted dramatically after leaving the Western Hemisphere. When I first traveled to India and later to China, I realized that the timeline I had been operating on-along with the concepts I had been learning and teaching-did not align with reality.

To start, I want to discuss a controversial artifact: the Makapansgat Pebble, found in South Africa. This small pebble, only five centimeters in size, was likely transported approximately 50-60 kilometers from its original location around three million years ago. This suggests that it was intentionally moved. At that time, the beings responsible for this action were not what we would call humans. They were conscious beings of some kind, existing long before any conventional human timeline.

What is intriguing about this stone is that it resembles a human face. Archaeologists have studied it and found that some of its markings were intentionally made. The question is: is this an artifact or simply a found object with human-like qualities? This raises a deeper question-what comes first: art or the capacity to perceive something as art? Do we suddenly decide to create art out of an empty space, or must we first be in a certain disposition to recognize something as art? If, three million years ago, there were beings who perceived and valued aesthetics, then the artistic impulse might be inherent in consciousness itself.

A common narrative suggests that prehistoric art was purely utilitarian-used for ritual, worship, or survival rather than for aesthetic appreciation. I would like to challenge this idea. The Western historical perspective often assumes a linear progression of human intellectual and artistic development, from primitive beginnings to increasing complexity. I disagree. The discovery of artifacts from 30,000-40,000 years ago, such as the Chauvet Cave paintings in France, reveals an astonishing level of artistic sophistication. Pablo Picasso, upon seeing the Lascaux cave paintings (dated to 17,000 years ago), famously remarked, "We have learned nothing." He saw no evidence of artistic progress-only continuity.

Filmmaker Werner Herzog explored this idea in his documentary The Cave of Forgotten Dreamswhich examines the Chauvet Cave paintings. These paintings are nearly twice as old as those in Lascaux and exhibit an equally high level of skill and artistic expression. Herzog proposes that the human mind, with its ability for aesthetic perception, appeared all at once, rather than developing gradually. This challenges the assumption that consciousness and creativity emerged through a slow evolutionary process.

Traditional historical narratives depict human development in neat, linear timelines-first one stage, then another, leading to progressive improvement. However, these models are based on ideological assumptions about progress. They align with capitalist notions of advancement, which frame history as a constant process of moving forward. This perspective influences how we view art history as well. Alfred Barr's famous diagram of 20th-century avant-garde movements suggests a structured progression: realism leads to impressionism, which leads to cubism, and so on. This model assumes that new artistic movements render previous ones obsolete, but is this truly how art evolves?

Philosopher René Descartes contributed to this way of thinking by developing the Cartesian system-a structured, rational framework for understanding the world. This system relies on representation, where external objects are mapped onto an internal mental model. Magritte's famous painting The Treachery of Images (featuring the words "This is not a pipe" beneath a painted pipe) plays with this idea, exposing the gap between representation and reality. Language, images, and perception form a complex web of relationships that we may never fully understand.

This brings me to the concept of writing and its impact on human consciousness. Plato's Phaedrus contains a story about the Egyptian god Thoth, who presented the invention of writing to King Thamus. The king rejected it, fearing that writing would weaken memory and disrupt the direct transmission of knowledge. This prediction was remarkably prophetic. Writing enables record-keeping and challenges authority, but it also shifts us from a world of direct experience to a world of textual knowledge. In oral traditions, knowledge is preserved through memory, sound, and direct teaching rather than through written records. Even today, Vedic traditions in India rely on extensive memorization, preserving knowledge in a way that differs fundamentally from text-based learning.

In contrast to textual knowledge, prehistoric art represents a more direct and unmediated form of expression. The handprints found in ancient caves around the world, created by blowing ochre pigment over hands pressed against rock walls, are an early form of artistic expression. These images appear in various cultures across millennia, suggesting a universal human impulse. Their purpose remains speculative-perhaps they served as a mark of presence, a spiritual act, or an attempt to connect with the environment in a personal way.

Similarly, early figurines such as the Venus of Willendorf and the Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel suggest complex symbolic thought. The Venus figurine, with exaggerated reproductive features, likely represents fertility and life-giving power. The Lion Man, a humanoid figure with an animal head, implies an early exploration of hybrid identities, myth, and imagination. These artifacts demonstrate that early humans were not merely copying reality but engaging with deep existential questions.

Music also played a significant role in prehistoric culture. A 40,000-year-old pentatonic flute found in Germany suggests that early humans understood musical harmony. The pentatonic scale appears in various cultures and is present in the mathematical ratios of planetary orbits, indicating a deep, perhaps even intuitive, connection between music and the cosmos.

Art, music, and spiritual experience in prehistoric times were not separate disciplines but integrated aspects of human existence. Early cave paintings, sculptures, and musical instruments were not simply tools for survival or representation but ways of engaging with the world on a profound level. They allowed humans to connect with nature, with each other, and with something beyond the material world.

In the modern era, art has become increasingly intellectualized, often reduced to conceptual games and textual discourse. Yet, at its core, art originates from an urge to connect-to align our inner experience with the outer world. This is what I mean by "art before theory." Prehistoric art embodies a direct, unmediated encounter with existence. It speaks to something fundamental in us, something we may have lost in the distractions of contemporary life.

Perhaps the real challenge is to rediscover this connection-to step outside the text, outside the structures of theoretical discourse, and into a more immediate engagement with being. The question remains: how do we move beyond the text while still embracing the knowledge it provides? This is something I continue to explore in my own practice and in my engagement with art history.

The spider brings forth its own web. This image from the Upanishad invites deep meditation on how nature brings out a thread that it forms into a complex symmetry. Looking at the spider, the thread, and the web-its function and the source of the complex pattern-we have an image that invites deep speculation about mantra, tantra, and yantra, about art and knowledge, about creation and information.

The 5th lecture explores art and scientific visualizations of sacred symmetry in a field of tension between ancient yantras and computer architecture, between temples and artificial intelligence. At the center of this exploration, I want to delve into Deleuze's concepts of the 'actual' and the 'virtual': how can manifestation be thought of in a plane of immanence.

Retinal Art and the Ruins of Representation: Revisiting Plato's Cave and the Notion of Rasa in the Natyashastra​

Christoph Kluetsch

"Something in the world forces us to think. This something is not an object of recognition, but a fundamental encounter." Gilles Deleuze - Difference and repetition p. 139

"Minds exist only in relation to other minds." (Mihai Nadin)

"even those elements designated as "basic" or "proto-elements" are not primitive but are, on the contrary, of a complex nature." (Kandinsky, point... p.31)

"Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible" (Paul Klee)

"the objective is that which has no virtuality" (Deluze, Bergsionism p.41)

"the eye thinks even more than it listens" (D+G Philosophy p. 195)

"This is the dark thought I have had about representation for so long: we are immersed in it and it has become inseparable from our condition. It has created a world, a cosmos even, of false problems such that we have lost our true freedom: that of invention." (Dorothea Olkowski, p.91)

Worldmaking

- Birds

Our animal instincts and our habitudes dominate a large part of our daily life. Our body calls with its needs, society has its expectations, we have our routines. Sometimes we follow an impulse to do something different, we want to escape, look for a change, or surprise, some excitement and fun, or we are just bored or overwhelmed. Then these little impulses bring change, allow us to become different, enable encounters, and create connectivity with the not-so-ordinary. We become being.

But there are other modes of being in the world. Some which are more directed: contemplation, experimentation, creativity, practice, curiosity, passion, and a desire for knowledge and to overcome ignorance. It is an act of 'worldmaking', in the sense that we combine different planes of knowledge, being, and activities - like intersecting walls so that they form a house, that we inhabit, that defines an inside and an outside, that allows us to leave (de-territorialize) and come back (re-territorialize). We explore the world from here, our home - standing between earth and heaven - that is not physical but spiritual. We design it and put up kind. And that art which we invite into our home is a mirror of the world inside and outside. We can access it through action, meditation, or melancholy.

- Melancholy

...

To art

-Artifacts

But I want to stay focused on worldmaking and its essence of doing artof what it means to create. Because that act of creation, in a deep sense of worldmaking, is something we seem to have lost. So when we go back into Greek antiquity or the time of Vedanta. We enter a world of magical and mystical thinking that has been touched by the rational mind and deep contemplation.

When we go back in time, to the beginnings of civilization and before, we find artifacts that seem to serve a different purpose. Figurines and drawings on cave walls let us believe that humans 40,000 years ago became aware of themselves, their place in the cosmos, and tried to make sense of it. Entering a cave and painting on the walls the life of animals, with the flickering light of a torch, only from memory and an ecstatic state of mind, shows the desire to deeply connect with a deeper reality. There seems to be the idea that life itself can be captured inside a house that does not serve as a home but as a temple. The figurines worn around the neck or carried as totems or talismans may have served as a physical manifestation of some spiritual energies to which the carrier connects.

What I am trying to get at is that they don't represent what they resemble. It is not an act of mimesis or copying the outer appearance. The contemplative mind uses the memory of the visual form as a vessel for the underlying forces, energies, principles, gods, life, consciousness... To art is to become and encounter beyond oneself.

- Damian Hirst Skull

Today, when we are drawn instead to technical perfection, when we wonder how the artist achieved a certain effect through light, composition, form, style, genre we are in a textual, a contextual world of cross-references, so-called progress and development. We enter the history of ideas, power, ideology, taste and connoisseurship. We deal with artist egos and art markets, surplus values, fetishes and accumulation.

Today we sometimes see artists who create a spectacle of otherness, a deep wonderland that is fascinating and intriguing for the most different reasons. But that society of the spectacle uses these world simulations as mental tourist destinations for the so-called cultivated mind. And if we feel fancy, we become critical, develop an attitude, and reflect on the state of the world we collectively build. We zoom in and out of politics and ideology, explore sensations of beauty, simulate other ways of being, experiment with identity, and celebrate and dive into the most complex emotions which we can evoke through poetry, performance, and visual and plastic arts.

Interlude with La Monte Yung

- Daniel Spoeri table

There is this deep discomfort with representation I have had since I can remember. As a child, I used to repeat words until they lost their meaning. Butter butter, butter, butter, butter, butter, butter, butter, butter, butter, butter... Until I lost the reference point, stopped thinking about butter, but then focused on the word, the letters, the sound. They became arbitrary. I focused on what is "represented" in the mind-the image, taste, smell of butter-but there was no butter. So, what is happening here?

- semiotics

Later, I learned there is a sign (symbol), a signified (object, referent), and thought or reference. I was baffled. How is that supposed to work? What else do I have in my mind? And how is that connected to the outside world, and how can I talk about it?

So I focused my studies on two areas: Art and consciousness. Why do we "art"? And how do we "art"? And what is art? When I want to think, I don't mean that rambling on of more or less clear rational thoughts and images, emotions, and memories, but a clear thinking that is holding world, that you might call vijnanaa thinking that is empty yet apprehensive, that is clear yet stays with the larger picture, a thinking that penetrates the surface without losing sight of it. In short, a thinking that is holding world. That thinking happens; it's not something that I do. It is within meditation now, and it was for a long time in my life in listening to music.

- La Monte Yung

Listening to music - a deep listening - where the now is constituted by the present hearing of sound, but also by the memory of what has been heard and the anticipation of what is to come-a now that extends into the near past and near future, that synthesizes time and transcends space and self. A moment of deep contemplation, filled with structure, consciousness, presence.

In that space, I like to let my mind and body, my self and my unconscious, enter a deep state of wake-dreaming. That world is a pure and abstract world, it is Consciousness sitting on a well-defined structure. If it is a recording, it can be repeated over and over again, yet the experience will never be the same. It is something of the plane of immanence, i.e., on the vastest level of cosmic being that is structured, that becomes consciousness when it runs through my senses.

A musician performs something that has come to them through either a score, an improvisation, intuition, or some practice-whatever it might have been. The artist expresses something through their performance, whether live or recorded. The information, i.e., the sequence of vibrations, reaches someone else, i.e., me. I hear, and my mind and body, my self and my unconscious, my emotions and memories are brought to the surface of consciousness. They flow. And if I let myself be just there, as focused and clear as the moment allows - I become that music.

- play music

The well tuned piano by La Mont Yung is a masterpiece in improvisation. He retuned Bach's well tempered piano back to its natural harmony and thus brings us closer to the harmonics of Indian Raga music, where the vibration is in the center of Nada Yoga.

The well tempered piano is a compromise in harmonics that negates the pure symmetry and geometry of overtones. To me the well tempered piano is a baroque distorted lie, that illustrates the rational pragmatic mind taking over natural frequencies and subordinates the divine under the mundane. La Monte Yung's performances are liberating the ears, activating pure harmony, and allow us to retune with nature.

So, this is the deepest mystery of representation. What is shared, by whom, with whom, and how? Artists are practicing-becoming an instrument, becoming music, becoming complexity. And the listener explores the encounter, resonates, embodies, and manifests. Nowhere is in the now and here any representation.

- Kandinsky

For Kandinsky art is always spiritual. It starts with a point (bindu) when moved it becomes a line, when the line is moved it becomes a plane. The form vibrate and resonate, they have rhythm

Story telling around a fire in the cave and the moving image

- Anish Kapoor Bean

What we are really dealing with since the beginning of aesthetic theories in antiquity is the art of story telling. How do you tell a good story? And how can you evoke feelings in the listener? How do I most effectively tell a story about love and passion, jealousy and devotion, commitment and freedom? Or how do I tell a story about power and corruption, about abuse and selflessness, about manipulation and heroism? I imaging people sitting around a fire 5000 years ago telling stories and refining them. Each time they become more colorful, more emotional, more engaging. And the audience participates, improving the story, a collective memory is formed a saga is born, the beginning of mythology, religion, collective identity.

These stories will be passed on from generation to generation and distill to its essence of humanness. And there we have the core of aesthetic theories. Telling, refining, listening to stories. Building effects, using tricks and rhetoric, developing tropes and styles.

- Chauvet cave

Now I see the flickering light of the fire. The group of people sitting around the fire listening to words and firing their imagination. Their shadows are playing on the walls of the cave they are sitting in; and the analytical mind kicks in. What are they actually seeing when they listen? But before going into what the true nature is of that what is seen - sitting across from each other over a fire with a vivid imagination - I want to look at the walls with its images: The shadow play, maybe even using the hands to form animal shadows, or some forms that produce images of vegetation, animals, people, landscapes. And the shadow theater on the wall will become a performance. And while I imagine people sitting around a fire 5000 years ago, imagining a story told by someone and seen on the walls of shadows, the question arises, what is real? Am I real? Is the story I am telling real? Is the story I am hearing real? Where there people 5000 years ago doing what I describe? What is their reality?

...

- Diagram Platos cave and Deleuze

...

In 1907, Henri Bergson criticized the cinematograph in his book Creative Evolution as a device that produces illusions. The sequence of individual frames that creates the illusion of movement, he argued, was ultimately a lie. Plato had similarly argued that painting was a lie, since one cannot eat a painted apple. In 1985, Deleuze "rescued" cinema from the accusation of being a lie by arguing that, although the criticism was valid, it was short-sighted. The film strip, he claimed, contains more than just individual frames; it is not merely the illusion of movement but pure thought-material philosophy. The élan vital (Bergson's concept of vital force), which the cinematograph supposedly lacks, is extended through the power of thought. The cuts and collages enable streams of thought that are unique to film. Film, then, is not "truth 24 times per second" (as Godard claimed) but pure philosophy (collage, montage, time, story, whole, nooshock).

...

Cy Twombly School of Athens

- Mona Lisa

BUT, I was strangely never really interested in story telling. I never considered art works to tell stories. Although most of them do, I am more interested in the formal qualities: line, shape, color, composition. Abstraction, concepts, ideas. Context, subtext, structure. Usages, power, ideology. I always looked at art through my mind and intuition. I never considered that what art represents as its object, purpose or meaning.

I always lived in the ruins of representationThrough representation humans have been building cultures for millennia. Heroic stories, idol worship, representations of power, ideology, ignorance, and a distorted sense of reality that is taken as what it appears to be to the outer senses. Butter, butter, butter, butter... That what lies behind the outer appearance - consciousness and its deep connectivity - cannot be represented. If at all, it can be invoked through art, and that invocation has to go beyond the evocation of emotions through story telling. That what matters in the world to life is consciousness and is best apprehended through intuition, contemplation, mediation. And when the world is over populated with sign and symbols, with art and artifacts, than the only way to show us a deeper sense of reality through art is through deconstruction. Deconstruction guides us into the ruins of representation, it fissures, cracks, inconsistencies to let shine though them that what lies beyond.

- school of athens

Rafael painted in 1510/11 The school of Athens for the Vatican, while Micheal Angelo was painting the bible scenes in the Sistine Chapel.

- school of athens names

In the center we see Plato, the author of the allegory of the cave and by many considered to be one of the greatest philosophers. He is surrounded by other great philosophers of Greek antiquity. They all came out of the cave into the light and have been rediscovered during the renaissance in Europa.

Cy Twombly repainted the school of Athens. He shows us marks and smearing, gestures, energies, movement, color, density, center and periphery, composition and deconstruction.

- Cy Twombyl

We are looking at a painting, filled with signs, it is a broken open, semiotic mess. The signs on the wall, the ruins of representation irritate us, they make us wonder. Couldn't I do that, or my 5 year old child? But what we seeing here is a masterpiece of 20th century art. It is the hight of complexity and reflection, an endless reference point that ties together the very essence of painting itself and brings us closer to the truth of images, that fact that they don't represent, or if they do, they do it very differently from how we think they do.

So I think from here we can explore the real meaning of evoking emotions.

Absence of Truth

- Descartes

When we are freed from the shackles and leave Platos cave, we see the light, the truth, the real of ideas, the essence of existence, pure and bright, good and complex. We enter a realm where we don't let ourselves be deceived by shadows, neither by objects, but see the ideas themselves. The world of idealism. But this world always seams to be the world of the mind, of rationality. That world is accessible to us says Plato, it is truth, it is a deeper reality. It is eternal and we, with our souls, are part of that world.

This reality however is of matter, in which we sit, it is less, inferior, deception - it is bad. Art is part of the matter reality. It is bad, Plato doen/sn't like it.

- Rasa

I want to try to look at the shastra and how they are embedded in a larger framework. The Rishis, who are considered to be some special beings, had seen truth and passed it onto the world through the Vedas. An early systematic summary of their teachings is found in the Vedanta, where the Upanishads give the foundation for how to understand the body, the outer and inner senses, the different layers of consciousness, realms of truth, knowledge and ignorance. They talk about rituals, language, gods, teachings, paths, the structure of consciousness, meditation, OM. They talk little about art, rather are their focused on how Atman, Brahman, Purusha and Praktri are intertwined, how they are the same, and how we can be everything, and everything is me. From that point of view it is understandable that to see truth doesn't need to go through a medium like art. It all happens in pure consciousness already.

Evoking Emotions

What I find intriguing about aesthetic theories that are based on the notion of rasa is there intersubjectivity. Artforms are tools of communication between the artist, the audience and the divine. The goal is to evoke aesthetic emotions through forms. But of course under these forms are experiences of the divine. These experiences of Śṛṅgāra (Love, Delight), Hāsya (Laughter, Mirth), Karuṇa (Compassion, Pathos), Raudra (Anger, Fury), Vīra (Heroism, Courage), Bhayānaka (Fear, Terror), Bībhatsa (Disgust, Aversion), Adbhuta (Wonder, Amazement), Śānta (Peace, Tranquility).

We are back to story telling, yet the stories are not deceptive representations of an idealistic realm, they are rather a manifestation of direct divine experience. The story itself is just a vehicle to evoke those emotions. Truth may be reached through collective divine experience.

Rasa and cinematography

Rasa is only existing as an aesthetic emotion, I don't love while watching a performance, but can experience love through a performance, I am not disgusted through a performance, but feel disgust through a performance. I am wondering if this can be compared to film theories, where we talk about suspension of disbelieve. When watching a movie I pretend that what I see is real, although I know that I am sitting watching moving images.

The viewer of a performance understands a double negativitythat the performer is not the person he/she performs, and also that the performer is not the person he/she is in real life. The performer is an embodiment of something that is not representing anyone in particular. The performer evokes an emotion, a character, that is not bound to anything physical, or referential. It is the pure emotion, a pure character to which the viewer connects.

Walter Benjamin, in the Artwork in the time of mechanical reproduction, focuses on exactly that point. Loosing its aura that traditional art form is not deprived of its glory but set free in the technical image of film, where the act of acting is even freed from the actor.

We see these technical images in a cinema that resemble almost exactly Plato's cave, and the circle closes.

-Rousseau

I would like to propose a provocative and maybe even extreme hypothesis: Maybe the Western creative mind is guided by melancholia and its black bile - though sad self-reflection and reasoning. While the Indian mind is guided by bliss and the search for inner light. And maybe that explains why the Western mind, 2,000 years later during the time of Enlightenment, thinks of enlightenment as the torch of light of the rational mind, as it is shown in the Pantheon in Paris at Rousseau's grave, and why the Indian mind seeks enlightenment only within oneself. Finding the light within means connecting to the source and opening a realm of knowledge that does not deny rationality but also does not restrict itself to it.

- Bwo

So to close, I want to introduce the concept of the BwO. The BwO is not a literal body but a conceptual space or state of being. It refers to a body or system stripped of its predetermined roles, functions, and hierarchies-an undifferentiated field of potential. It's a way of thinking about becoming, flux, and creativity beyond fixed identities or functions.an undifferentiated field of potential.

The snake in paradise seduced Eve to eat a fruit from the forbidden tree of knowledge that holds the distinction between good and evil. Why was the tree of knowledge a forbidden tree? Why did the snake seduce Eve? What did the fruit taste like?

When I asked myself why I want to talk about this, I felt like Eve standing in front of the tree, talking to a snake who attempts to seduce me to eat the fruit. Do I want to know? I don't mean knowing about a topic, a trope, or a genre. I mean, on the broadest plane of existence, why do I want to engage on the plane of knowledge? Why do I want to know anything? Wouldn't ignorance be bliss and ultimately let me stay in paradise, let me stay closer to creation? Why do I need to reflect and create a cognitive dissonance between myself and the world? When I see the tree of knowledge and its fruits, why do I have the urge to understand it and not just eat the fruit? But isn't that what the snake is trying to do, to seduce me to enjoy the fruit, to eat it instead of reflecting on it. What exactly is the snake offering?

I think that first, the seduction of the snake is offering a choice. Eve can eat the fruit or contemplate it. Most likely she had been contemplating it for quite some time when the snake came and whispered into her ear to eat the fruit. The contemplation must have been a special one, because everything else in paradise had been there for enjoyment; only that tree, together with the tree of life, was separated from the world of enjoyment by a taboo. That tree of knowledge was not to be enjoyed. I am trying to imagine that, living in paradise and having two trees there that I cannot enjoy. I try to imagine what it might be like to not have eaten from the tree of knowledge, to have remained in the state of ignorance and face, from that plane of existence, a taboo, the unknown, the lush sweet fruits that I can't have. The taboo interferes with and creates a will, a wish, a wanting, and desire. I desire that which I don't have; there is no need to desire what I have, that I can already enjoy. The snake, sitting in that tree, is that desire to know.

But we are still in the paradox world here. Why is that tree in paradise? And why is there a snake? And why can I not just leave it alone? Often this is related to obedience, that God established laws, which were broken by Eve, and therefore suffering came into the world. I am more interested in the epistemological, psychological, and spiritual aspects of that story. Something awakens when the human mind leaves the state of enjoyment and embraces reflection and the desire to break the mirror of reflection to get to a deeper reality. But the key question here is, why is the tree forbidden? And when Eve eats from the tree, why do Adam and Eve realize their nakedness and feel ashamed? And why is there such a drastic punishment that humankind is thrown out of paradise?

I have a physical reaction when I think about these things. My curious, rational mind wants to explore these boundaries, but I am also getting nervous, I feel anxious, my blood pressure goes up. I want to know; I am seduced into that type of thinking, yet my body doesn't feel comfortable. It took me a very long time to acknowledge the relationship between thinking and the subtle signs of the body that indicate how I feel about what I am thinking and how the territory I am entering with my mind feels. Do I feel comfortable there? Is there something for me to find? Do I have to face something there? Is it dark or bright? The snake offering the fruit seduces Eve into a territory that is uncomfortable; she realizes that she is naked and becomes ashamed. She loses her innocence. It is depicted as if this process is not reversible. Were we all born outside of paradise after that? Or do we individually go through that process when we grow up, when we leave the mind of the infant and enter into the rational, reflective mind? For instance, in the mirror stage, when the toddler recognizes himself/herself in the mirror, or when we reach puberty and don't like to be naked in front of others anymore. Once we realize that we are not in paradise, once we realize that the world out there is difficult to comprehend and that the meaning of our existence is even harder to grasp, we try to constitute meaning; we try to make sense.

But in the garden, there was another forbidden tree, the tree of life. Both were in the center of the garden. The serpent seduced Eve into eating from the tree of knowledge, not from the tree of life. And because Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge, they became like gods, knowing good and evil. Yet God did not want them to eat also from the tree of life to become immortal. He did not trust his own creatures, so he banned them from paradise.

Auro Artworld is organizing a series of 6 lectures at the Centre d'Art multimedia room in Auroville. These lectures, conducted by Dr. Christoph Kluetsch, will explore connections between art, philosophy, and spirituality, bridging Eastern and Western traditions to illuminate the enduring questions of existence, consciousness, and creativity.

The series will be offered on the first Tuesday of every month, beginning on October 1^st.

Tue Oct 1^st 2024 at 5pm: 

Apples and Mangoes: Iconography and the Foundations of Art History

Apples are the fruits of the tree of knowledge in Christian paradise; they symbolize the
world in the hands of kings and are a fruit of poison in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
The mango, on the other hand, is a fruit of sweetness and joy. Ganesha received it as a
reward for circumventing Shiva. Creative conversations and gatherings often happen under
the mango tree, which can be found in temples and gardens of enlightenment. The
iconography of these symbolic fruits invites a reflection on key art historical methodologies
by E. Panofsky, H. Wölfflin, and A. Warburg.

Future Lectures

Tue Nov 5^th 2024 - The Principles of Chola Temple Architecture: A Case Study of Irumbai

Tue Dec. 3^rd 2024 - Retinal Art and the Ruins of Representation: Revisiting Plato's Cave and the Notion of Rasa in the Natyashastra

Tue Jan 7^th 2025 - Who is Seeing When Seeing: The Kena Upanishad and the Sensation of Logic

Tue Feb 4^th 2025 - Film is Thought: H. Bergson's Cinematograph and How J. L. Godard Shocks the Viewer into Reality

Tue Mar 4^th 2025 - Reading Deleuze in India: Plane of Immanence, Rhizome, Brahman, and Conversations with AI

Game - Misstep

In the West, I used to think that playing had to do with games and games had to do with rules. To play a game is to enter a space that is constrained by rules, and the player can develop strategies within those parameters to act according to the rules with the goal of winning. There is the larger game theory that has been applied to sociology and other fields, and there are computer simulations that generate hypotheses based on sets of rules, and the game is to approximate what we call reality, or a set goal. In the realm of life, the animal kingdom or during our childhood, we thought that play is practicing skills that somehow give us an advantage.

I played chess yesterday. I enjoyed playing. I know and follow the rules, of course. I played with someone, not against a machine. I played because I like to play. My mind can stay on the chessboard, strategize, think ahead, deceive, create conflict, sacrifice... But then there's this contemplative element: I reflect on myself while playing, find myself in a personal relationship with the other player. We play together; we want to spend time together, we smile, tease and observe each other. The game is a social interaction, a way of communicating and discovering. How does the other person play? How do I play? How do we react when someone has an advantage or disadvantage? What kind of feelings arise in relation to the strategies of the game and in the personal relationship, and how do they influence each other? That's the place I like to be when I'm playing. I don't like to be too fixated on the chessboard. I feel trapped when I get too immersed in the strategy.

There is something revelatory here, something deeper about how we are in the world. If we look at play through the lens of social Darwinism, then games have a function. If I see games as a playful exploration of the social relationship with the other player, then play becomes love. It becomes teasing and provoking, caring and hiding, showing and pretending, trust and joy, disappointment and frustration. It becomes connectedness and the entry into a shared space in which we play.

The Isha Upanishad begins with: "All this is for the dwelling of the Lord; whatever is individual movement in universal space. By renunciation you shall enjoy; do not covet the property of another." And the Aitareya Upanishad begins with: "In the beginning, the mind was one, and everything (universe) was the mind; there was nothing else that saw. The mind thought, 'Behold, I will create worlds for myself out of my being'." I think that the beginning of these two Upanishads illustrates play in the highest sense. That which is everything and wants to experience itself through creation and self-awareness does not follow any rules; it manifests a world or many worlds in which some rules are also created. Entering these worlds through individual consciousness or universal principles is like entering a game. Our reality is nothing too serious. It is an exploration of a possibility. To be in one of these realities is to play, and play becomes an energy of creativity. Brahman enters its creation through Atman and Purusha to move with Shakti and Prakriti. In this larger game, playing is discovering the rules and tools, exploring and experimenting, interacting, learning and teaching. It's the same on the chessboard - just a smaller world. There is no point in winning the game. Playing is living, is being, is breathing and consciousness.

So when I win or lose, I shouldn't keep my mind caught up in the rules and developing strategies. I should enjoy the game.

It's difficult to play with others. I can't play with many. If the other person stays on the battlefield of the board, it becomes boring, even dangerous, as these little rules start to influence and limit the connected minds and hearts. When I am asked how I feel about losing, I get irritated. I don't understand this question. It's not about losing or winning. I rather think: How did a certain move that I made come about? What thought, impulse, opportunity and ignorance were at work? What does it mean to make a misstep in this context? There was a moment in the game when the other person left the game and entered into a conversation. I made a half-thought-out move during this brief conversation to play with attention. This put me in a disadvantageous position on the board. I wonder if the misstep was the move or if moving during the conversation was the misstep. How far does the game go? I said I don't usually make those mistakes, and didn't quite understand myself when I said that. The other person focused on the word "usually" after the game, which shifted the game to a different reality.