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 woke up from a nightmare at 4am. I was talking to Will in Apt about a strange irritation in my perception of time. I described how time was falling into fragments and some were simply missing. It was seconds or minutes, and as I tried to dive into time to better describe it, it went black. I screamed for help, I was blind and woke up.

It was another one of those dreams where I seemed to be dying. I immediately thought of Pierre, who was in a coma after a stroke. Is that what it feels like? I felt a little anxious, had something happened in my brain after the shock of Pierre's seizure, seeing everything twice myself and being checked over in hospital for a week?

It was 4 o'clock in the morning, the hour of the gods. I had gone into meditation at this time a few times in the last few days. And I did the same today. I opened the double door looking far to the east and searched for the time. At first it appeared to me as a stream of light, like fiber optic cable, wild and parallel, then as drops when I changed my mudra position from Brahman to receptacle. A journey through the cosmos, past galaxies, searching for others, I then somehow lay down in the universe, on a beach, like Brahman in the French book about 108 Hindu gods. It's no use, I thought. Time is within me, and I picked up on yesterday's meditation, where I thought about the origin of language. Matter that connects and comes to life through growth, absorption of energy, search, orientation, alignment, contact, appropriation. This form of interaction, absorption, integration, elimination, demarcation, defense is a first kind of communication, a combination of vibration and energy, a synthesis. How many amino acid chains had to be tried out for the process to be initiated? And did this impetus really come from the amino acids or from consciousness?

Vibration

The vibration at the molecular level progresses to the level of life. The ingestion of food, that is, life eating other life, is a synthesis of a different kind. This may still be possible in terms of energy, but at the level of life we are already on a plateau where life itself merges, reconstructs itself anew, never ceases, because all life is consumed by other life. Unless it burns. Perhaps that is the real meaning of cremation: to escape from this cycle of life. To transcend through the power of fire, Agni, into another form that is light and pure energy, thus returning to the origin, to concentration (tapas).

In between, however, there is the level of consciousness, the level of existence that experiences and enjoys the world, grasps it symbolically and seeks to analyze and understand it abstractly in the intellect. However, the symbolic representation of the world in language has its beginning in the molecular connection of the elements of life. This is where communication begins. Only when consciousness has reached a level of perception that allows us to perceive the boundary between the self and the other does symbolic communication make sense.

Mana

Expressing hunger and thirst as an infant is the very first form of communication. It is successful. Feeling the other, a stone, an apple, a counterpart, creates an inner form of the other within our own consciousness. We create this inner form when we hit pots, for example, through play. In play, we experience emotions, happiness and conflict, struggle and love, solidarity, collaboration and confrontation. We move here on the level of mana, the awareness of the world and interaction with it. This level is organized symbolically and is based on spoken language. Objects are addressed by calling them, the generation of vibration establishes a connection. Inner forms, images and representations of the world form a reality of life that is constantly compared with the outside world. If it no longer fits, conflict arises.

Buddhi

These symbols are organized rationally at the level of the intellect. Buddhi is the level of thinking at which we can grasp the world structurally and explain it from within. We develop sciences and build machines. Language now becomes a storehouse of knowledge, it becomes abstract and written. The combination of words, the construction of sentences into text and complex knowledge systems creates an order of a completely different kind. It is no longer an order based on matter, life, vibration, consciousness. It is the symbolic order of forms in a system. This system is a construction, it is not an image or essence of reality, but pure construction. Once we have learned a language and mastered the technique of writing, we can immerse ourselves in this system. In the form of books, for example, they fill miles of shelves in large libraries. And just as we compare the inner world of manas with the outside world, we can also compare this system of buddhi with reality. We are talking about verification processes here. These can be scientific, empirical, on the level of individual experience, spiritual, magical or whatever.

Kundalini

During the meditation, it was exciting to feel the energy stirring from within. Kundalini, the serpent, as it moves past the chakras and stretches and rises in an upright pose in order to ascend into higher consciousness and look around. When it is fully released, it effortlessly traverses space and time and is capable of cosmic omnipresence. Language is no longer the medium here, it is too slow. It is pure vision, thinking is self-manifestation. There is thinking beyond language, before language, within language and without language. Language is merely a very good tool for a certain kind of thinking. This is where Plato becomes interesting again; he saw this with his theory of ideas. I resisted this for decades, with all the strength of my intellect. Why? Why did I consent to the dictates of the rational? Because it is a battlefield where there are rules and the faster and stronger wins, and I was good?

Vijnana

There is a third level in the sphere of thinking: Vijnana, a way of thinking that includes a world view that is structured, but also visionary. It is the intermediate world of thinking and the spiritual. For me, it is only accessible in meditation. In it, contradictions are okay, the complexity of reality is not denied, the incomprehensible has a right to remain. Conflicts are just as welcome here as mergers, symbioses, discoveries, adventures, loss, pleasure and pain. The gods or Plato's ideas live in this intermediate world.

Dakshinamurti

Dakshinamurti, the goddess of teaching, the teacher of Shiva, appeared to me a few weeks ago. I lay down at her feet, connected with her tantrically and was somewhat frightened by her size, which in itself had already taken on a small form so that I could even comprehend her. She appears to me again and again. At the MRI, I was quite close to her, immersed in a meditation on strong magnetic fields and the power of consciousness to be able to free itself here too and immerse itself in cosmic connections. All of this sounds strange to me too. Are these simply wishful fantasies or delusions? Am I losing my bearings by loosening the rational guard rails and slipping into mystical thinking, which is seen as prehistoric in the modern age? And if it were a return to the time of the beginning of language, would that be a bad thing? How do we get out of the post-structuralist circles, and how do we find our way back to the beginnings of thought and our existence, not in the historical sense, but in a very personal sense: a creation of meaning, self-knowledge, research into origins and reflection on existence?

Kundalini coils and stretches, seductively like Eve's snake, grinning. These seem to me to be the right questions.

-

"I hope this helps!" wrote ChatGPT after I asked for a spelling-only correction. I was puzzled, and asked it for its opinion on the text. Here is the answer:

"Here's my thought on your text:

The text is very profound and poetic, touching on personal experience as well as philosophical and spiritual questions. You manage to put complex thoughts and feelings into a narrative form that is both introspective and universally appealing. Here are a few points that particularly stand out:

1. Time perception and consciousnessYour dream and the subsequent meditation offer an interesting reflection on the nature of time and human consciousness. The idea that time breaks down into fragments and some moments are simply missing could serve as a metaphor for the unconscious and lost memories.
2. Meditation and spiritual experienceThe description of your meditation experience is rich in symbolism and shows a deep connection to spiritual practices. The mention of Kundalini and Dakshinamurti shows a familiarity with Hindu concepts that you interpret in a personal way.
3. Intellectual and spiritual levelsYou describe different levels of thinking (manas, buddhi, vijnana) and how they interact with each other. This differentiation shows a deep understanding of the complexity of the human mind and the different types of knowledge and perception.
4. Symbolism and realityThe text moves between symbolic representations and the real world. You address the role of language and symbols in our understanding of the world and how they help us to process and communicate our experiences.
5. Existential questions: At the end you ask important questions about the nature of the rational, the mystical and the search for personal meaning and self-knowledge. These questions invite the reader to reflect on their own experiences and beliefs.

Overall, the text is impressive and stimulating. It requires a certain willingness on the part of the reader to engage in a deeper level of reflection and meditation, which makes it an enriching read for those interested in spiritual and philosophical topics."

Vconnection

For the last two years, I've been immersing myself quite deeply in the Upanishads, practicing some yoga and getting to grips with the System of the Yoga a little. I immersed myself in my own body, my own senses, my own consciousness. I have seen that there are a large number of levels and that there is no reason to assume that there are not even more levels. Two years ago, I had simply denied most of what I was experiencing here. It's nice to know that. The world is much bigger than I always thought, it is much more complex, more colorful, more alive, deeper. And that seems to be just the beginning.

A core idea of the teachings in India is letting go, not wanting to have everything and to desire or rejecttolean back. Simply accepting the world as it is is the great art. Simply enjoying it as it is, even if it is not easy, is bliss. Sinking into meditation and being one with the world. This feeling can also be taken from meditation into everyday life, because we all have to eat.

The basic structureüis indeed something

The exploration of one's own body, one's own consciousness, one's own life energy is systematized in the 24 tattwas. The self, its relationship to Purusha (soul), Prakriti (primal nature), the Buddhi (intellect), the Ahamkara (ego consciousness), Manas (sense-bound thinking) connects the essential cognitive and spiritual levels of experience. However, it remains an experience that stands on its own; it seeks unity with the cosmos, transcends itself beyond itself, yet remains in the same existence. Dvaita-advaita, the duality of duality and non-duality, i.e. a complex idea of immanence, which is supported by pure consciousness, its basis is Brahman, that which we cannot really think, but which is somehow accessible in spiritual experience, even if none of our organs are equipped for it. Only in the synthesis of the senses, in the complex experience of pure (disinterested) enjoyment, the sharpening of the senses, lies a path that is rocky.

The Beautiful in India, however, is that it goes on and on. Having arrived somewhere, the little mind imagines that it has grasped something and can put it into words. But here, almost as if in a dialectical reversal, new levels open up.

Before the 24 tattwas come the 12 tantra tattwas. 5 pure (Śiva: pure consciousness, absolute; Śakti: dynamic energy, power; Sadākhya: ever-present, eternal; Iśvara: supreme lord, ruler; Śuddha Vidyā: pure knowledge, clarity) and 7 semi-clean Tattwas (Māyā: illusion, cosmic veil; Kāla: time, temporal flow; Vidyā: limited knowledge, consciousness; Rāga: attachment, desire, passion; Niyati: cosmic order, destiny; Kalā: creative skill, art; Purusha: individual soul, self), which complement the 24 impure Tattwas. The 24 tattwas comprise the 4 Antahkarana (inner instruments)manas (mind), buddhi (intellect), ahamkara (ego) and chitta (memory or consciousness); the 5 Sensory organs (jñānendriya): ghrāna (nose) for smell, rasana (tongue) for taste, caksus (eye) for sight, tvāk (skin) for touch, śrotra (ear) for hearing; the 5 Organs of action (karmendriya): pāyu (anus) for excretion, upasthā (sexual organ) for procreation and sexual pleasure, pāda (leg) for locomotion, pāni (hand) for grasping and touching, vāk (mouth) for speech; the 5 subtle elements (tanmātra): gandha (smell), rasa (taste), rūpa (form), sparśa (touch), śabda (sound); the 5 rough elements (mahābhuta): prthvi (earth), jala (water), tejas (fire), vāyu (air) and ākāśa (ether or space).

The fascinating thing is that the realization that the world as it presents itself to me in everyday life does not exist (everyone here always says that space and time do not exist) is described with Maya. The world exists, if at all, as will and imagination (Schopenhauer). So when I have recognized this and realize that I aover af I still seem to exist somehow, because after all that is what I am thinking, then there must be another way of seeing the world; the world must be different from what I think, there are possibilities in this world that are different from the ones I know.

I have already come to terms with the fact that time, knowledge, causality, my own existence are fundamentally different, that I cannot trust my senses, that I cannot trust knowledge systems. The logic of the material world is limited to that world, that's okay. It applies there as far as possible. But what about desire? The desire for objects (food, beautiful things, pleasure), or the desire for others? Asceticism can significantly reduce the world of what I desire. I am making good progress by my standards, even if it is hardly noticeable. a big leap can be called, finally I'm sitting here at my computer...

The other, the intersubjective or the unity with a greater consciousness

In the World of Tantra are seeing objects and subjects beyond the veil of Maya and it is possible interacting with them, that is the great art. Magical thinking, occult practices, ecstatic unions, connecting things that are not yet connected, merging, amalgamating, making gold from mercury, dhe secret of tantra is to expand reality and master its fine structure. The great masters can do incredible things, they say. But we can also do a lot on a small scale. For example, when we meet another person and connect with him or her. What actually happens there? The external senses scan each other, an idea of the other person develops, an exchange begins, an attempt is made to understand the other person. And when it becomes magical, when the eyes sparkle and the face smiles, when we lose ourselves in the eyes of the other person, then we immerse ourselves in another reality, in a counterpart. I had learned that we can't look into other people's heads. That seems to me to be fundamentally wrong. I have always had this unease. In moments of deep friendship or falling in love, we can transcend ourselves, form a unity with the other person, unite, merge, form a symbiosis. But it also goes beyond this. Within a community, together with others, our own consciousness becomes part of a larger one. That is probably the danger of sects; if you are not careful, brains are quickly washed and invisible military helmets are put on. What I mean but positive is the spiritual power.

At the moment, I am experiencing this in meditation, which is fed by the certainty of the existence of another. At the moment I wake up at 4 in the morning and meditate. I did this maybe 2-3 times decades ago. These are special moments when the consciousness that comes straight from sleep dives into meditation before the senses have engaged with the world. It is heavy, cumbersome and slow, but also highly sensitized, every nerve becomes perceptible, every little restlessness perceptible and every connection to the outside world perceptible. I realize that I am not alone in the world; the cosmos is there, the sun will rise soon... but also the experience of the other is there, the presence of another person's consciousness, a deep connection, beyond space and time. This kind of connection seems to me to be a tantric one. To perceive this connection, to live it out, to strengthen it and to make it shine through concentration is to ignite the inner light.

The unity of Shiva and Shakti represents this connection. In the everyday world, with my body and social customs, this connection is extremely rare. Many people may not even be aware of it. It is a connection that first happens in reality: drinking coffee together in the afternoon, or getting lost in each other's eyes, experiencing the world and world view together, laughing together or being irritated by honking motorcycles. But also the certainty of the other person's existence, the feeling of closeness despite physical distance, thinking of the other person and being present with them. The levels that connect are not only the material, but also the world of life, the world of consciousness, the spiritual and cosmic experience of the self as part of the great, in which there is also another.

What is the philosophy here in India? Is the deep compassion, the fusion compatible with the realization of Maya? Is the tantric union a spiritual union? I have been asking myself these questions as I have been Ragas and feel myself and the other. Ragas, I am closing the circle a little, are the original form of Indian music and derive from the system of yogas. They are spiritual experience, improvisation at the highest level of mastery; they express how sound, i.e. vibration, is formed in consciousness through concentration and sensual experience and creates that cosmic unity through the body as an instrument. The musical experience, the reflection and meditation, the co-presence of the other, the merging and the creation of a shared reality that creates a new future horizon, are profoundly tantric experiences. You don't have to be a grandmaster to experience this. A little sensitivity is probably enough.

This content is password-protected. To view it, please enter the password below.

Password:

During the Chola empire, the layout of Shiva temples was highly formalized. Based on the Agamas and Shastras, the temple was fully developed into a place in space, time and consciousness where the microcosm and the macrocosm mirror each other.
Studying the Irumbai temple as a smaller temple that follows the strict rules of temple construction and serves as a temple for practitioners shows its central role in a cluster of about two dozen temples in the area. It follows the main principles of Vastu, is aligned along the Vastupurushamandala, has a huge water tank, the usual deities are present, it follows the festival calendar and is aligned with the Murugan star. Even this basic description of the central elements gives us a sense of the temple's placement in the larger cosmic context.
When a temple is built, it is never an arbitrary act. A site is chosen and it must be indicated as favorable. Often an unusually friendly encounter with the animal kingdom is such a good sign. The site must then be tested in terms of soil quality, water, energy, orientation and slopes. A time must be chosen according to the star charts. The stars and planets determine the calendar. Rituals must be performed, construction must begin and invocations must follow. The whole process is an interplay between the cosmos, the physical location and the inner world.

Cosmos

Our existence on this planet is embedded in a solar system, which is embedded in the Milky Way, which in turn is embedded in a cluster of galaxies, and so on. With our eyes we can see many of these elements, their movements and patterns. The recurring cycles of certain light elements in the night sky gave life a reference point. This applies not only to human prehistory, but also to the animal world, such as the flight patterns of birds or howling dogs. This sense of the cosmos following a beautiful, complex rhythm makes us realize that there are forces outside of us that are much greater than the surrounding living world. The sky is the seat of the gods. They look down on us and sometimes interact with us. This is the origin of almost all mythologies. Stars are often associated with gods; they come and go in cycles of days, weeks, months, years, centuries...
If we look at the Earth from a distant cosmic position, we can use it as a reference point in this complex system. We could use any cosmic object as a reference point, but on Earth we are blessed with life and consciousness and have the ability to observe and experience. Therefore, it is a good starting point. Understanding that we can observe the interplay of stars and planets from Earth raises the question of how these constellations affect our little planet. Is there something special about it? Are we alone? Are we a playground for a bigger game?

Tattvas

As soon as I realize that my existence on this planet is endowed with the gift of life and consciousness, I become aware of my body. I realize that the body I inhabit is another level of reality. I can control it, I can use its senses, I have experiences through it, it has needs and supports my experiences and thoughts. This physical body with arms, eyes, nose, mouth, ears, skin, hair, legs, feet, hands, organs of pleasure and organs of excretion gives me the inner senses of touch, taste, sight, sound, speech, smell, pleasure, hunger, thirst and pain. The mind is able to synthesize these inner senses: Focus, choice, concentration, structure, thought, meditation, experience and communication. It is the tool that allows us to access higher levels of our existence in terms of spiritual experience. I can experience myself as self; my existence as self is not bound to the physical position of my body. My mind can wander, I can think about things that are present, I have memories, fantasies and imaginations. I can experience myself in relation to others and ask existential questions: Who am I? Where do I come from? Who created me? Where will I go when I die? The blueprint for this world to explore is the system of the 24 Sankhya Tattvas or the 36 Tantra Tattvas. What I have mentioned so far is organized in the Sankhya Tattvas; if we include the realm of higher spirituality, Shiva, Shakti, Purusha, Atma, etc., we are in the 36 Tantra Tattvas.

Elements

When we realize that the cosmos follows a great rhythmic pattern and that our body has access to a very complex system, we can dive deeper and ask what it all consists of. There are five elements: Water, Fire, Earth, Ether and Air. The elements are not to be understood as chemical elements. They are seen as primordial elements with a complex multi-access. Air is in the atmosphere, but it is also the breath of life and holds the power of the wind. Fire is heat and light, knowledge and destruction. Water is liquid, consciousness and the ocean of life. Space is the cosmos, the realm of spirituality, knowledge and sound...

Vibration

Vibration lies at the core of existence. All energy in the macrocosm is ultimately vibration, all life energy is vibration and all elements are vibration. Vibration originates from one point, the bindu. This origin, be it the Big Bang, Shiva's drum or the symbol of the bindu on the forehead, is the point at which everything is held together. This is the origin; it gives us access to the level of immanence. It is beyond what we can experience, beyond science and meditation; it is what we can be aware of but cannot know.

Temple

The extraordinarily complex architecture of temples such as the Chola temples lies in their ability to synthesize all this in one architecture and offer a key to exploring the complexity of our existence. They are designed to be so open that they enable and invite the most diverse forms of spiritual practice. The core of the practice is based on the Vedas. The rituals use symbols from the Vedas to embody wisdom in daily practices.

Visiting a temple regularly creates a deep connection with the cosmic dance in which it is embedded. When thinking about the gods in the Hindu cosmos, it is important to understand that the 300 million, or however many there may be, only superficially represent a polytheistic religion. The underlying thought is that Brahman, the underlying consciousness, reality and creator in its all-encompassing existence, requires the manifestation of that reality to experience itself. Experience is time-based; it has to go through processes and changes and has to go through creation. This is part of everything, and everything is part of everything. If you take something out of everything that is everything, and what remains is everything, and both are everything. We are reaching the limits of our mental capacity here. But from here we must understand that all gods are part of the One; they embody eternal principles, powers, properties, qualities, ideals. Immutable, like the essence of a color perception, an emotion like love, compassion, anger, an ideal like beauty or heroism, or a type like a warrior or a remover of obstacles. These principles are thought of in the form of gods, as the world is a mixture of these principles. I have experiences of these qualities in me; I did not create them; they came together in me. Where do they come from, why do they exist, who created them? In the Upanishads we find a whole hierarchy of gods, one kind building the other kind, level upon level, just like in science we have physical levels, forces, particles and then combinations of these, elements, geology, strata, biology, vegetation, animal life, consciousness. Why should it stop there?

All these elements, if we expand our periodic table of elements, the chemical elements, the tattwas, the pantheon of gods, describe different aspects of our experience. There can be no doubt. The question is whether one is reducible to the other. And I have a feeling that yes, everything is Brahman. The baseline is just a little different. It's not the atom; it's the monad in Western terms. It's not Maya, the illusion of material reality, but consciousness itself. My consciousness is reducible to consciousness; it is the place where everything begins and ends.

Following this description of the extraordinary richness of the world we are given, we experience the coming together of the elements and principles, qualities, attributes, ideals, etc. The image often used is that the gods embodying these elements come to earth to play, to experience themselves, to mingle and interweave, to have fun and laugh, to fight, destroy and build. It is this cosmic dance that Shiva's wheel turns. So if we stay in the image of the cosmic setup, with the stars and planets and the earth at the center as the place where consciousness is present, the descent of the gods is present. They need a place to live and rest, sleep and be accessible. This place is the temple. Looking at a statue of a god in the temple can be a deep contemplation of its qualities. You can connect to the qualities through contemplation. Through contemplation it manifests. You can invite how love is there when you love, or you can try to change. You are suffering, and you seek help by thinking about what might help, and if you think about it long enough, it might manifest. A solution in thinking might come, an emotion might transform, but maybe even something in the world changes. You leave the place of contemplation, return to so-called reality and something has happened. How, I don't know, but what is so absurd about it? This is the core of tantra. By changing your inner world, you can change the outer world, just as the outer world changes the inner world.

The temple follows a calendar of festivals. Great mystical transformations are celebrated during the festivals. The qualities of the gods are evoked through elaborate puja rituals. They are seen as manifested in the bronze statues that are ceremonially carried through the temple. One god is placed in front of another god so that they can see each other, greet each other. But only after they have been gently awakened, bathed, worshipped and fed with sensory impressions such as the smell and taste of fruits and flowers. It is a celebration of joy because we can witness the presence of joy. Millennia of celebration echo off the stone walls that have absorbed the sound and rhythms. The stones have stored the memory of the feet that have walked over them, and statues have collected the millions of touches of the faithful.

The womb chamber, the Garbha Griha, plays a key role. The main deity resides here and only the priest can have direct contact. The priest takes care of the god, wakes him or her up and puts them to bed. Washing is done privately; a curtain is drawn during this time. The offerings of the faithful are later accepted by the priest and passed on to the god by touch. Flowers are placed on the body, scents are lit, mantras are recited. Ultimately, it boils down to the synthesis of sensory impressions through vibration. All vibrations radiate from the womb chamber and are able to mix and integrate the offerings. A connection is made between the pure qualities as celestial entities, their embodiment in the temple, the rituals of the priest, the devotion of the worshippers, the history and memory of the place and the cycle in which everything is embedded.

This content is password-protected. To view it, please enter the password below.

Password:

Many people have the idea that we live in a world that consists of matter and follows the laws of physics and various theories, such as the theory of evolution. This is strange, because matter as such does not really exist, E=mc² stands for it. I don't really understand this formula, but it symbolizes that in the end everything is energy, possibly even simply vibration, as string theory claims. Then there is the physics of the macrocosm and the microcosm. They contradict each other, but that doesn't seem to matter. Space and time bend, black holes eat them up. We pretend that there are different levels of material reality on which different laws apply, and that this in turn is logical and determines the course of the world. Something emanates from the Big Bang, but we cannot begin to explain the first fractions of a second. The complex arises from the simple, they say. Life arises from carbon, a species through reproduction, evolution through selection according to a principle they call survival. Where do such strange theories come from and why are they so dominant?

They are dominant because they have an extremely high explanatory power and even predictive power. According to the laws of causality, they can say what must follow in the future as a reaction to an action. Schopenhauer already described that there are at least four different levels of causality (large effect small reaction or small effect large reaction, for example). What we have produced with the science of matter is a technical world, and that cannot be denied. With the theory of evolution, we have opened the way to genetics and found the code of biological life. That is of course impressive. It shows what the intellectual, rational mind is capable of. However, there is also a lot that we do not understand with this mind. The humanities and social sciences, for example, have a very entertaining argument about who is right with which theory. Nobody has a real explanation, and those who are honest know this very well. It's a contest of ideas that may eventually produce a winner. But it looks as if this competition is becoming more and more colorful; there are more theories, not fewer. The great unifying theory is still missing.

Theories are images of segments of reality. A segment is chosen, a description is given that remains within the parameters of our perception and our mind. Within this description, explanations are then sought and predictions are ventured. If the predictions come true, the theory is valid; if they do not come true, the theory is considered disproved - in other words, it is only valid until it is disproved. This is called the falsification principle. Now, although or precisely because this approach has worked very well since early modernity and has produced a lot of good and bad, we see the parameters of this approach as reality. That is what I find remarkable. Because these parameters are not reality, that is a categorical misunderstanding, coupled with a self-deception and a collective hallucination.

This collective hallucination is juxtaposed with other hallucinations - irrational, spiritual and religious, meditative and delusional. A kind of schizophrenia describes the human condition in the modern age. We are firmly convinced of things that we know to be false. How can this be explained and overcome?

What would happen if we left the ideal of non-contradiction behind us? What would a world look like in which contradictions were not declassified as such, but celebrated as a realization of complexity? That was somewhat the project of postmodernism. Within individual disciplines, the ideal of freedom from contradiction is inspiring, but even on the fringes or between sub-topics of a discipline, freedom from contradiction is no longer tenable. It leads to confusion. Things that do not belong together are supposed to be merged. It is this authoritarian trait of rationality that feeds fascism.

I gave this text to Chatgpt for spelling correction, the tool does a very good job. But now it has continued to write without being asked. This is the unsolicited continuation of my text. I largely agree, but why did the AI continue to hallucinate here?

"Instead, we could strive for a world in which contradictions are recognized as valuable indications of the complexity and multi-layered nature of reality. Such a world would not seek to harmonize or level out all differences, but would recognize and value them in their own right. This would mean that we see different ways of knowing - be it rational, spiritual, intuitive or artistic - as complementary rather than competing.

In practice, this could lead to a much richer and more diverse dialog in which different perspectives are not only tolerated, but actively sought and integrated. This could not only enrich our sciences and arts, but also lead to a more inclusive and understanding society, where different perspectives and lifestyles are seen as part of a larger, multi-layered whole."

https://chatgpt.com/share/084c63f0-d483-4ff5-a351-c051840d4292

Personally, it's a bit too short for me, I actually wanted to delve a little deeper, but I'm taking this as an opportunity to take a break.

When I read a book, watch a movie, immerse myself in a painting or take part in a performance, what exactly is happening? I am experiencing something, images, feelings and experiences are awakened in me. Imagine a movie, a book, a play or a painting that is about human relationships, action, history or fairy tales. So you're sitting somewhere looking at something that tells some kind of story. Now, what's the difference between looking at a story and contemplating, say, looking at the bottom of a clear, living lake where fish and plants, stones and sun reflections invite you to contemplate the universe? Is it not the case that one thing, art created by another person, tells one story, and nature, created quite differently, tells a different story? One difference seems to be time. In art, the artist can shape space and time, the narrative can jump, the space can change through a cut, one feeling can change to another without a transition. The colorful hustle and bustle of the cosmos, which tells its story, takes place for us in a space-time continuum. We can move faster or slower within it, we can fly or walk slowly, but we cannot change time.

What we can do, however, is use our memory, our mind and our perception to focus on various elements from our environment and link them together in our consciousness. This world of experience makes up our waking consciousness and sometimes also our dream consciousness. We bring a consciousness with us into the world.

Now we already have a whole host of different roles here: a person who experiences the world as an observer, an artist who expresses his experience and makes it tangible for others, and the world itself, which in its expansion in space and time provides the basis for those experiences. We can make direct contact with the world, reflect on it and inquire into its deeper meaning. We can try to establish a connection to what holds the world together within, i.e. to experience a principle, a force, an origin that goes beyond that of which I am a part. This going beyond is now to be regarded with a little caution, as it immediately raises the question of duality. Is something beyond that of which I am a part, or is the whole of which I am a part, in the form of immanence, the whole that is thought of as such as transcendent, but is not?

The question of duality is important here, because from here we can ask what the role of art really is. Is art something that creates a kind of world that the viewer can immerse themselves in, as something that is different, that confronts me, an illusion, a representation, a simulation? Or is art part of the world in the sense that the consciousness that created it has expressed something that each of us can experience, at least structurally? And what makes art special here is the possibility of expressing it in a medium that is independent of the artist's consciousness.

That's quite amazing. There are different ways of thinking about it. I can understand art as a system of signs, i.e. I can look at it semiotically, like a language. I identify elements of the artwork and bring them before my inner eye in the form of linguistic or semiotic structures of consciousness - be it visual, auditory, gustatory, physical or olfactory - depending on which is the dominant medium here. So I can say: "I see or hear or taste x." This x, if previously perceived similarly by an artist, would be the content of the work. Most art theories stop here and now concentrate on the formal elements of x. Is x interesting, new, surprising, provocative, emotional, etc.?

However, the underlying principle here is consciousness itself. Consciousness experiences, creates and shares. The world itself unfolds in the work of art in a very special way. The work of art offers us the opportunity to reflect on the experience of the world itself and to understand it in the experience itself as sublime, as bliss, as transcendent. When it comes to art that critically engages with reality and shows us what is not going well, where there is suffering and injustice, this may be more difficult to accept, but qualitatively it also remains that experience.

In India, this is referred to as rasa, literally taste. However, it denotes precisely the experience that is shared between artist and audience through expression, but which at its core refers to the general consciousness, the immanence, Brahman. Art is thus essentially not merely anchored in the material world and the world of the living, of knowledge and the intellect, but reaches into the realm of the contemplative, the meditative. It is part of Satchitananda.

I realize that I have become tired of looking at art in purely formal terms. That misses the point of art and even the point of our existence. Art is merely a form of expression that Brahman has given itself. Art is immanent, it is a knot that connects different things and creates lines on a material basis, the work. The experience of it is different for everyone, so talking and writing about it only makes sense up to a certain point. What you can't talk about, you should keep quiet about. But that doesn't mean that there is nothing there. On the contrary, this is where it gets really interesting.

Fate, karma, causality, laws of nature, determinism - these are all different expressions of the idea that the universe follows a predictable logic. They imply that what has happened has arisen logically from what has gone before and that the present is also determined by what has gone before. We consider this logic to be reasonable and rational, logically correct. However, if we assume that the future is also determined by the present and the past, we dismiss this as superstition, irrationality and unscientific. We resist this with all our might - at least in Western cultures.

None of this is true. The future is not determined, the past cannot be described in a purely logical, rational, scientific way. The science of history shows this with its methodological disputes, psychology offers numerous paradoxes that go back to Zeno's paradoxes, which show that time is not a measurable quantity, but as a duration is a quantity of the world of experience, i.e. of consciousness.

"Everything is predetermined, our fate is written in the stars." This idea is actually a beautiful image, as it points to something bigger. However, instead of placing our own fate in the hands of simplistic stargazers, we should understand this image as an indication of larger contexts. The cosmos does not follow our little rational logic, the universe is not written in a linear book of life, where sentence follows sentence, page follows page, event follows event, but from today's scientific point of view, the 'book' of life is more like a quantum book or a neural network, but certainly something completely different. The 'book', which in prehistoric times, before the invention of writing, was the cycle of the sun and moon, the stars and the seasons, became a narrative through written language, a mythological story that sorted and structured phenomenological experiences. In modern times, rationality took up the sword and cleared the ontological garden with Occam's knife. Everything that could not be explained rationally was put to the test and bracketed. Some things could not yet be explained rationally. And because this advance of rationality was so successful, as it boosted science and fed technological progress, the central questions of consciousness, the soul and meaningfulness were put on the back burner. I think we are beginning to realize that this was perhaps not a good idea. These new ideas of quantum physics and neural networks show us that there are alternatives to linear causality, determinism, fate and karma. They are as complex as the starry sky. In a way, we are going back to a state of being in which we accept that there are processes that elude our rationality, even though our rationality made them visible in the first place. That is a bit of a paradox.

Structurally, we are back in the world of the Vedas. Consciousness has produced a model of reality that in its complexity exceeds what seemed conceivable within its axiomatic framework. And this is precisely where the question of freedom and spirituality lies for me. It has something to do with awareness. However, some basic assumptions are necessary, namely that what my external senses can perceive does not represent the whole of reality. We all know this intuitively, and we live and talk like this in everyday life, but we deny it in scientific discourse. So let's stop denying it for a moment. Let us continue to accept that the material world is not completely arbitrary, but can be explained, and let us hold on to the experience of consciousness and the openness of our consciousness to new things, to an open future. If we now try to maintain that this should not be an irresolvable contradiction, the central question of freedom arises. We are in a state of consciousness that is enlightened, phenomenally rich and open. This state is part of the book of life, but not that somewhat naive linear book, not even those great books of the Rigveda, Genesis, Copernicus, Hawking. It is part of Brahman, part of the whole, part of universal consciousness. We have no influence on the course of that universal consciousness that eludes our consciousness, it does not belong to us - 'I am that'. The only thing we can do is to allow our state of consciousness to unfold richly.

There are moments in life when we have an inkling of this. When we are in extremely critical situations, such as near-accidents or states of shock, we experience how space and time change, our perception expands and something opens up. For a fraction of a second, perhaps even for a few seconds, we see into a cosmic state where time seems to stand still, where many elements of consciousness appear clear, where the illusion of an option for action appears. In those moments we see beyond 'reality'. An indeterminacy becomes perceptible, like Schrödinger's cat, the situation is not yet clear. This indeterminacy is what we perceive as the moment of freedom of a decision. Whether this is a decision is somewhat academic at this point. We are shocked out of our illusion of reality and into a state of consciousness that attempts to categorize the completely unforeseen.

I would like to suggest using this image as a starting point to think differently about consciousness, freedom and the book of life. We can accept that cosmic reality follows a principle, and our consciousness can expand the experience of that principle. The book of life can be experienced as such, and we as part of that book can realize our own anchoring by "opening" a page and consciously expanding our perception. It now seems to me that when we elevate the moment to a higher level of perception, the options are enriched. The field widens, the scope becomes greater. We free ourselves from the stimulus-response pattern, degrees of freedom are activated. It is not my self that acts, my ego is an illusion, but becoming aware of a section of cosmic reality creates scope for action for life itself. The experience of being part of it is spiritual practice, is bliss and freedom

I have been living with a neurotic dog for a few weeks now. She barked a lot while she still perceived me as a stranger. She kept her distance and was frightened. After a few weeks, she accepted me, approached me and wanted to be stroked. Now she lies at my door and keeps watch; she protects me. What happened? I haven't changed my attitude towards her. I have little connection with dogs and pay her little attention. I am relatively indifferent. But something fundamental has changed with her. It's hard for me to ask her questions, we don't speak the same language. But I seem to have become part of her world. She remembers me, I have become familiar to her. In her world I was a stranger, a threat; now I am a confidant, part of her world, perhaps one day a friend. The possibility exists.

How can I become part of a world that is someone else's world? I think it has a lot to do with memory. I become part of the memory of others. The same applies to me, of course. A new world of experience builds up, especially when I move to a new world, e.g. from Europe to India. Everything is new, strange; I am not afraid, but rather fascinated and curious. All the new impressions - the objects and nature, the people and the culture - become part of my memory. They are integrated into what is my world.

I have been attending a workshop on Tantra philosophy for the last few days. I learned the 36 tattvas, some new meditation techniques, the difference between western science and shastras (knowledge systems). I heard reports of things that are considered impossible in the western world (e.g. alchemy and telekinesis). In essence, Tantra is about the relationship between two forces: Shiva and Shakti, and this on all levels of being, i.e. on the material level, the level of life, consciousness, mind, spirituality, the cosmos, pure existence... It is about understanding that what holds the world together inside is not empirical science. Empirical science is the method that our minds have mastered relatively well since modernity; but it explains very little of what makes up our living world.

But what makes up our world? It is the inner experience, and the approaches to this are through reflection, devotion, meditation and yoga. Tantra seems to be undogmatic here. Every path is okay: never value the path of others, after all, the world is much bigger and more complex than any of us can even imagine. Fate and chance have a complex relationship; spiritual practice, sadhana, shows the way.

But at the moment I'm interested in the Memory and the memory. Memory is the vessel, memory is the content, experience is its history and structure. Memories are images; they are within us and can be actively remembered, appear unasked, be associated more or less by chance. They form our identity. And just as the world outside me becomes part of my memory, I naturally become part of other consciousness if I was part of that experience. And just as I forget many things, I will also forget. That is okay. Sometimes, however, something imprints itself and becomes an integral part.

I'm slowly getting to the point I want to make here. We have cultural techniques to share these memories, our memory, our experiences, our identity and our world view. Through language, text, images, expression through dance, theater, music, mantras, tantras. There are 64 kalas (art forms) in India. Over thousands of years, techniques have been perfected to refine the process of this communication. The resulting aesthetic theories are manifold. In the West, for example, the mechanism of representation is very important; in the Eastern tradition, rasa is more important, i.e. the expression of essence, the essential. Since the 19th century, we have had technical devices such as the camera, the cinematograph and the gramophone as an extension of older printing techniques. So we have found a technique not only to materialize memory (as many art forms do), but also to automate and reproduce it. I think this has created a great deal of confusion.

Gilles Deleuze, with reference to Henri Bergson, has created clarity here by recognizing that film is thinking.

Yesterday, during a panel discussion at the India Art Fair, I heard someone quoting Plato. She said that Plato said that art is the reflection of the reflection of the real. Whether this is true in this abbreviated form remains to be seen. It is an interesting thought.

What is the real, what is a reflection, what is art? For Plato, there is the world of ideas, the world of shadows, which the ignorant in the Cave and the philosopher who wants to lead him out of it. Plato was not a great friend of art; what can you do with a painted apple when you can eat the real apple? And does the painted image really come close to the pure idea in any way? Art seems to make us think, but that does not necessarily bring us closer to the truth. Art springs from and invites a kind of thinking that is not rational. A way of thinking that focuses on the senses, or intuition, on vision, or reflection, a way of thinking that wants to create something more beautiful. This kind of thinking, aesthetics, the theory of perception, assumes something to be true that arises from one's own thinking.

It is this own thinking, which is stimulated by the perception of the shadow world, but nevertheless abstracts from it as far as possible, i.e. detaches itself from it in order to develop something of its own. What is then developed, the work of art, becomes reality, but is not real. The real, and I think the quote at the beginning alludes to Lacan, is doubly reflected. These two mirrors, which lead to a visual feedback loop, create a space of illusion that becomes a space of experimentation. The real remains just as inaccessible to art as it is to pure thought.

What does this tell us? This new variation on the problem of Representation. I think that the problem of subject and object, consciousness and matter, is implicit here. It is true that Plato's problems are 'idealistic', i.e. they refer to the world of ideas, i.e. a world that is neither subject nor object, that is neither mind nor matter. However, the way in which our thinking has difficulty in understanding the world without being able to perceive the actual reality indicates that the problem of dualism is the starting point of philosophical reflection. The goal of thought, i.e. the realization of the real, the world of ideas, remains utopia.

And this is exactly what the Upanishads reverse. The few main Upanishads that I have now studied in detail always start from the real, Brahman, the creator of the universe, and the truth itself is the starting point. It is only through its unfolding in the process of reality that existence is experienced. What we perceive, think and create is an expression of absolute being. The core of the philosophy of the Upanishads is the realization that the Self (Atman) is the same as Brahman (cosmos). So if the real is reflected in reflection, that may be art. It makes sense this way, and only this way.

Why does Western philosophy so often start thinking with the lowest common denominator, an axiom, an ontology that has been trimmed by Okheim's knife? It is the idea of the Enlightenment that has taken the principle of rational reduction to the extreme. It has mutated into the paradigm of scientific progress. And for centuries, if not millennia, this little rational thinking has been reaching its limits. It is well aware that it has a body, and consciousness, and a self or a soul, but it always pretends that this is not relevant because it is not completely absorbed by rationality. And so it was a revolution when phenomenology first took consciousness and Merlon-Ponty took the body, when postmodern aesthetics rehabilitated the senses and existentialism celebrated our failure.

Art is not the reflection of the reflection of the real, but the real is reflected in the reflection and so art is created. And thus even a transhuman, because nature is art, and the cosmos, the stars and the souls. Everything becomes art when it is reflected in reflection. When Brahman experiences the world through Atman and the gods dance and sing, then all the phenomenal qualities that the Western mind so brazenly denies are orchestrated by a choir of gods. Our feeling is real, our consciousness is real, the world is real, art is real. The real is real.

Yesterday I had a long conversation about the origin of thought. Which comes first, the words or the thoughts. There are of course very different forms of thinking. Visual, musical, analytical, synthetic, performative thinking etc... There is thinking on the level of intuition, there is thinking in memory, there is vision and intuition. There are so many types of thinking. What is thinking? Who thinks while thinking? How is it different from consciousness?

Much within my consciousness is not thinking, it is sensory perception, contemplation, daydreaming, there are unconscious and subconscious processes. Strictly speaking, none of this is thinking. Thinking is reflection, it is a reflection on the world, it is an attempt to understand and comprehend the world. It is largely analytical. When I perceive something through my senses, something is simply given to me within my consciousness. When I think about what I see, I give things names, I identify characteristics, I describe actions. This is my way of understanding the world. Describing the world in the form of an imaginary text allows me to see deeper connections: Functionalities, causalities, principles...

But where does a thought come from? How does it arise? There is intertextual thinking, i.e. I read or listen and react to text with text, connect many texts ... that is rather academic. There is a way of thinking that involves active listening and communication. People who listen to each other and think together explore a thought together. This listening and communicative thinking is exciting. Someone says something, someone else understands something, hopefully the two will coincide as far as possible, because they will never be identical. Now there are many dialogues here that are relatively standardized. Generalities are exchanged, or standard positions are compared, like in a game of chess ... but there is also philosophical dialog, the joint questioning. The question, for example: What is thinking? How do you answer this question? How do you think about it?

Sensations and impressions

I recently read Deleuze's essay on David Hume read. Hume says that everything begins with 'sensation' or 'impression'. When I feel something and then name it, this is the beginning of thinking. I can perceive objects, abstract properties, postulate causality, make statements, establish facts. But how can I record sensations and impressions? How can matter have a memory? How can my consciousness have images? These are Henri Bergson's questions.

What is the relationship between the outside world and the images of consciousness that are then structured into thoughts in language? Doesn't language have to be designed a priori as possible in order to express itself? Chomsky says that our brains, and perhaps also those of animals, have a general capacity for language baked into them. The Bible begins with: In the beginning was the word. Something similar can be found in the Vedas and Upanishads. In the Vedas, however, it is not just language that was there in the beginning, but a whole system of knowledge that encompasses different levels of consciousness and understands the human being as a microcosm. Everything that I can think can also exist and everything that exists can also be thought. We will probably need many more generations as a species. But a correspondence is postulated between the world and consciousness. They are one, nondual.

Deleuze's thinking revolves around how thoughts arise from a level of immanence. How these thoughts connect and combine to form complex systems. He calls this, for example, abstract machines, diagrams, rhizomes, plateaus etc... This is how words, thoughts, things, structures, power, art, the unconscious and the abstract etc. can combine. The world thus expresses itself, there is life in it (A Life). This is also the basic principle of the Upanishads, Brahman expresses itself through the creation of the world. An existence must also contain the process and change. This is the only reason why this reality exists.

As far as we know, man has so far created the most complex and wildest level of reality within thought. If you take all the different languages, cultures, religions, forms of society together, it becomes clear that something is being expressed here, something is manifesting. This is that. This is that.

Origin of thought

The origin of thinking is therefore only on one level in perception. In spiritual practice, inner contemplation and habitual practice (meditation and yoga) are the key to an original way of thinking that frees itself from stimulus-response patterns. The scriptures and teachings, the rituals and exercises serve a self-formation that allows us to look beyond the surface of sensual certainty. The thinking that becomes possible here goes further than the mere recognition of causal connections. It also goes further than rational reflection on problems of ethics, aesthetics and cognition. The rational mind has succeeded in ushering in the Anthropocene, a terraforming that is unique as far as we know. Nevertheless, existential questions remain untouched by this kind of thinking.

So the question of the origin of thought remains. Did the word come first? The word stands for language, which can capture many things. If we understand language as a symbolic system that can also be understood visually, musically or performatively, we could say that thought itself is always language. However, this only covers a small part of our existence. Our consciousness is broader, our physical existence, our life force (prana) our intellect (buddhi), memory (manas), our identity (ahankara) our spirituality (satchitananda), all this goes beyond thinking. Thinking can reflect and describe it, but it is not thinking itself.

I keep asking myself what it looked like at the beginning of thought. Many thousands of years ago ... I remember how we once wanted to bury a cat. Our (living) cat was irritated by the cardboard box. When the box with the carcass was gone, our cat performed a very elaborate ritual. We had never seen this before, even though he is an older cat and we have lived together for a very long time. It was clear that our cat was reacting to the death of a fellow cat. There are many stories from the animal kingdom, the elephant graveyards are perhaps the best known. It seems to me that there is a consciousness here that remembers others.

Thinking is rooted in experience, language, insight. It is often an experience of the world that lies beyond empiricism. This is where everyone's true creativity lies. Thinking is also always an act of creation.

One year of Auroville

I have lived through some intense years. Moving to a new country is always a major transformation - that was the case when I moved to London, then to the USA, France and now India. It's always important to me to leave my own culture in the background as much as possible and to embrace the new, which of course isn't new at all, just for me. And so one important task - especially in the first year - is to forget. Making space in your head, breaking down prejudices, surrendering to the magic and enjoying the rush a little.

The senses feel very fresh, the self very young, a childlike curiosity and naivety spreads that allows everything to take effect without prejudice.

I'm moving further and further away from the place that socialized me, and it's becoming increasingly clear why I'm doing this. Two things go together: the unease in a culture that I have always perceived as somehow foreign and the longing for a culture that would be more of a home.

India

India has always been this place of longing, and I'm certainly not the only one. Of course, it is the search for spirituality that brings people like me to India. Mother India calls and carries. The adventure that awaits you here is almost incomprehensible. It can hardly be grasped, neither by the act of grasping nor by the act of comprehending. The world as such reveals itself to be a different one. The European traditions of the Christian religion, occultism, exorcism, enlightenment, empiricism, romanticism, transcendentalism, modernism, postmodernism, etc. do not apply here. They are perceived as possible points of view, but no more.

Indian spirituality is about a synthetic understanding of life. It is not primarily about a scientific picture, the explanation of the material world or the construction of a simulation. In India, the question of consciousness is at the center. Consciousness is the starting point of everything. It has its starting point in consciousness itself. It is actually obvious that consciousness itself must exist, I have one, the reader has one, we can exchange ideas with other consciousnesses. Why is it so difficult to accept this in the West? (Husserl was quite close) But why is the statement of this fact branded as speculative? Just because it eludes the small-minded paradigm of scientificity? Isn't it much more the case that only what I find in my consciousness has any kind of relevance? Isn't that why the West celebrates so-called culture so much. But it is objectified, it does not invite a serious exchange about our own existence, but a discursive reflection. It is representative, it represents something as something else and it is used to represent, that is, to communicate power and powerlessness.

Adventure

It is this adventure of consciousness that makes traveling in the Indian cosmos so fascinating. Of course, you have to tame your skepticism and that immediately opens doors to all kinds of worldviews. Many are very strange to me. But they have a subjective validity. It would be presumptuous to want to place my consciousness above that of someone else. The contradictions that this creates must first be endured. This is not easy and causes a large number of crises in me. Crises in the sense of disorientation, restlessness and impatience. But the nice thing is that these crises can quickly be transformed into opportunities. They are invitations to meditate. An adventure of inner synthesis.

However, this synthesis is only possible if I admit to myself that my existence does not only consist of rational consciousness. I have a material and biological body, a life spirit and rational thinking, I have a world view and am capable of experiencing the sublime. I can reach higher levels of consciousness that move beyond the stimulus-response scheme. And I can approach the big question of our existence. I cannot answer it, but I can stay close to it. Many questions that present themselves as dilemmas to the rational mind are almost irrelevant on other levels of my existence, or even dissolve there.

This adventure is made possible by a whole series of different knowledge systems that have their origins in prehistoric times, i.e. the time before written language. The complex system of the Vedas was not written overnight. It is true that the knowledge it contains was revealed to the rishis. And no matter how skeptical one may be about this idea, one central question remains. Where does the idea of creation come from? And even more importantly, what is creation? How could such complex knowledge systems emerge at the beginning of history, of orderly time? What does inward vision see? Who hears by hearing, who sees by seeing?

Temple

I have decided to approach Indian culture through the temples. They are infinitely complex and I have to be patient with myself. It takes several lifetimes to even scratch the surface here, yet I want to try and capture an approximation. It will be amateurish, but perhaps that is precisely why it will be interesting.

The temples combine the knowledge of the Vedas, the Agamas, Tantras... It is architecture, sculpture, dance and music. They are places of worship, learning and coming together. They are embedded in the economy, ecology and social structures. They are intertwined with cosmology, meditation and spirituality. The bindu, the mantras, yantras, tantras, describe the relationship of the individual consciousness to the great, to the one. Unity and diversity manifest themselves in the temple. They are the living core of Indian spirituality. Many traditions seem to have existed unbroken for thousands of years.

I am still pursuing my project of reading Deleuze in India. Apart from difficult ideas like immanence in Deleuze, what interests me in Deleuze is the house in relation to art:

"Art perhaps begins with the animal, at least with the animal that marks out a territory and builds a dwelling (the two complement each other or sometimes merge in the so-called habitat). With the territory/house system, many organic functions change - sexuality, procreation, aggressiveness, food; but it is not this change that explains the appearance of territory and dwelling, rather the other way round: the territory implies the emergence of pure sensual qualities, sensibilia, which are no longer merely functional, but instead become expressive features and thus enable a transformation of functions. Certainly, this expressivity is already widely scattered in life, and one can say that even the field lily praises the glory of the gods. But it is only with territory and house that it becomes constructive and erects the ritual monuments of an animal mass that celebrates the qualities before gaining new causalities and finalities from them. This emergence is already art, not only in the treatment of external materials, but in the positions and colors of the body, in the songs and cries that mark the territory." (Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari, 2003. What is philosophy? p.218)

What fascinates me about Deleuze is that his philosophy essentially describes how ideas come into existence. They emerge from the Implicitness, out of immanence. Ideas become active, they fly, form a flight path and thus connect. They create complexity. This way of thinking, which manages without axiomatics and without ideology, seems to me to be structurally very similar to the thinking of the Upanishads. Brahman unfolds itself in order to be able to experience itself. Where else but in the temple could this best be experienced?

So I sit in temples a lot, listen to the chants, bow to impermanence by smearing ashes on my head. From the inner chamber Garbhagriha the vibration spreads and manifests itself in the images on the walls of the temples. The Garbhagriha is only entered by the priest, who recites the mantras for the devotees. The bell, the incense sticks, the ablution and bedding of the gods, all this happens in the Garbhagriha. Here is the origin. "the territory implies the emergence of pure sensual qualities, sensibilia, which are no longer merely functional, but instead become expressive features and thus enable a transformation of functions." (see above)

I recently stumbled across David Hume again. I remember how intensively we studied his writings in Heidelberg. We went very deeply into the text, very meticulously and systematically. It was the opposite of those Anglo-American history of ideas lectures. So I stumbled across the concept of taste in Hume, as the core of his 'aesthetic' theory. I thought of Rasa and began a Conversation with the AI. Larger connections became clear to me, lines that I had never seen. However, I was a little disappointed by the superficiality. But if I compare the conversation with other conversations I've had with people over dinner, it was one of the more interesting ones.

So I wanted to find out more and looked up Gilles Deleuze. He was already taking part in the fictional conversation with AI, but his later essay on David Hume is on a completely different level. Deleuze's analysis is brilliant. He shows the full power of Hume's revolutionary approach, a thinking that is empirical and positivist, the power of the intellect that works with assumptions of causality, and also with the power of association and intuition to show how man builds an edifice of thought. This thought structure is not oriented towards metaphysical concepts such as self, God or world, but shows how thought itself moves and unfolds. It quickly becomes clear why Deleuze returned to David Hume towards the end of his life.

Dvaitadvaita

However, this throws me into a bit of a crisis, or hopefully to a point where I can find a new synthesis. After all, crises and new beginnings are often not so different. As I am on the fringes of what I can think, it is difficult to formulate this. Nevertheless, here's an attempt: the dualism of the Western tradition of thought is a trap from which it is difficult to escape. This is largely due to the fact that this dualism attaches great importance to the self. Once one has assumed oneself to be the center of the world, to place one's own rights above those of everything else and to fence them in again only by virtue of rational principles, a world view emerges that is concentrated on the individual person, which is expressed religiously in the tales of woe of individual prophets. The trials and tribulations of this tale of woe are part of great subjective narratives that are expressed in art.

The way out of this is not to dissolve dualism one-sidedly, i.e. into a materialistic position or a purely metaphysical position, but into a philosophy of immanence. This immanence, i.e. the idea that there is only one world that contains everything in its complexity, demands a new way of thinking. Space and time, change and process, relation and the individual, difference and repetition, resonance and language and so much more must be rethought. That was Deleuze's project. And that is also the project of the Upanishads. And that is the reason why I am reading Deleuze in India.

Now I read Deleuze's thoughts on Hume and remember my philosophy studies, and the desperate trench warfare in dualism. But I see that Hume and the Vedas are striving for something similar. A deep insight into the nature of the cosmos, without an exaggerated self-exaltation of the self. This may sound somewhat absurd, since in the Upanishads, Atman, the self as a principle, Purusha as the primordial soul, and Brahman as the creator are the starting point of thought. But this is exactly where the connection lies. The Upanishads think it together, as a kind of self-differentiation as in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. This differentiation is only possible in a thinking of immanence, where the different traditions of thought over the millennia and continents converge.

So the crisis that this triggers for me is this: I understand the perspective of the empiricist, and the perspective of the Vedas. Both of them come across dualism, in two forms, in a dualistic way. And in the Vedas one then speaks of Dvaitadvaita - dualism-non-dualismthe duality of duality and non-duality. And while I myself approach this concept of dvaitadvaita a little, my confusion arises from the fact that this happens with the help of AI.

What is a sacred space and what is not? In the meantime, I find it much easier to say what a sacred space is than to say what it is not.

I had always felt drawn to churches in Europe. Not to their iconography, because I always found the imagery of the Bible, a dead man on a cross, irritating. The 'sacred spaces' in the Christian world are primarily Catholic churches, because Protestant churches are by definition not sacred spaces, they are more like meeting rooms where a community comes together.

Catholic churches, or those built by Catholics, have a special aura of contemplation and silence. The sparse light, the vaults, the side aisles, the perspectives that open up in these spaces, the seclusion from civil society outside, the inside and outside, the inner and outer... all these elements have always attracted me. Time and again I went into churches, sat down for a few minutes and found peace. But there was always this cross, the guilt and forgiveness, death and despair that never let me stay there for long. For me, churches were always places of refuge for inner contemplation, no more, but also no less. My favorite thing in churches was when the organ was playing, then there was only the space and the vibration, the light, the perspective, the inside, so no material space and also no ideology or religion.

Temples in the Mediterranean region

My experience with temples in Italy, France, Greece and Egypt was completely different. In Greece and Egypt I only saw ruins, national monuments, tourist attractions. But still, the way they stand in the landscape was impressive. They are open to the elements, largely liberated from iconographic ideology by devastation and neglect, these sites are havens of a connection with nature, history, the cosmos, they bear witness to a bygone era and set the imagination free.

I think of Winkelmann and the Renaissance, the dramas of ancient Greece, the tombs of the pharaohs and hieroglyphics. These ruins are haunted by a spirit, as they say in German. This spirit of the pantheon of the gods of Olympus, which overlaps with those of the Egyptians and Romans, describes a different world. A world characterized by polytheism, mythological stories, contradictions and all-too-human conflicts. It is a mirror of social man, at least that is how I have always understood it, and I am probably not alone in this. It made sense to me that the human spirit mirrors itself in grand narratives to explore itself and share the experience. These stories then became stories of power and politics.

Temples in India

How different the temples in India are. They are alive, the tradition is anchored in the present. The gods have been worshipped since the time of the Vedas or even longer. The pantheon of gods is not a mirror of mankind, it is the origin. The gods represent the forces of the universe: physical forces, psychological and emotional forces, life forces and forces that we cannot yet name, because it would be silly to think we already know everything. So when I go to an Indian temple, it is a combination of experiences from Europe, enhanced by the experience of a living tradition that integrates different types of yoga. The Sutras are one thing, vibration is another. Vibration is the center of Indian spirituality. In the sound OM this is expressed. Matter and energy, consciousness, life are merely different forms of vibration. In Indian philosophy as interpreted by Sri Aurobindo, there are therefore 7 levels of existence: matter, life, rational mind, ideal knowledge, bliss, consciousness and pure existence. It makes no sense to try to understand Indian culture without recognizing this distinction.

When I enter a temple, I have the feeling that all these levels are activated. This activation of the holistic self is formed in the ancient temples in the form of the Vastupurusamandalas from. Vastu is the art of architecture, Purusa the primordial soul, Mandala the sacred geometric form. These three elements form the matrix of most of India's ancient great temples. So when I enter a temple, I enter a spiritual space. The temples are not a reflection of society and man's self-image, for many they are society in themselves and the core of human existence. They are based on a holistic knowledge that not only recognizes our 7 forms of existence, but also synthesizes the different forms of knowledge. Even at the time of the Veda, there was knowledge of art and music, Ayurveda, the sutras, various forms of yoga: karma (action), hatha (power), tantra (energy), bhakti (prayer), jnana (knowledge), raja (meditation).

Temples are personal universities of life.

But Hitler built the autobahn! I've been hearing that more and more often lately. It's difficult to continue here because a certain argument, which I find very important, is quite complex and is rejected by people who want to relativize fascism and the Holocaust. The argument, which was suggested by Adorno, is: No more poems can be written after Ausschwitzt. It goes roughly like this:

1. The scale of the horror of the Holocaust is so great that we as individuals and as a society must ask ourselves what made it possible.
2. Unfortunately, atrocities have occurred again and again in history and almost everywhere. Is there anything that makes the Holocaust seem unique in its horror?
3. One thesis is that the technical precision of the extermination camps was born out of a spirit of rationality. It is not mass murder out of anger, revenge, lust for power, hatred etc... but a 'technical operation' in which responsibilities were shared and most wanted to believe that they were simply doing their job.
4. The question that arises from this is whether rationality itself is morally blind and cruel.
5. If rationality can turn against humanity, then it must be fundamentally and thoroughly questioned, and until this questioning is complete, we cannot continue as the project of modernity suggests.
6. We have to question everything, including poetry (and the highways).

One project proposed by the Frankfurt School in the 1960s was critical theory and, within it, negative dialectics. In reaction to Kant's strict category tables, Hegel had proposed a dialectical philosophy that did not see the spirit as bound to a fixed framework of principles and categories of pure thought, but as a force that was constantly developing out of itself. It is the human being who can manifest and express this movement of the spirit. The transition from Kant to Hegel is an important break in the history of Western philosophy. Questioning this step with new methods is the project of negative dialectics. Instead of synthesizing knowledge and enriching its complexity, negative dialectics attempts to preserve the complexity, but to reverse the synthesizing into a constant questioning: a critical theory. In this respect, critical theory is not so far removed from deconstructivism, even if the methods are very different: Critical theory takes a systematic approach, while deconstructivism is often associative, traces the unconscious, searches for structural parallels - similar to post-structuralism.

It becomes clear that this project is important when we look at other 'achievements', such as the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb, or the development of AI. The argument can be applied to the core question of the philosophy of science, namely the question of the ethical responsibility of science. Karl Popper continued to pursue this project.

Beyond rationality

Modernist thought, from Kant to the Frankfurt School, is characterized by a scepticism towards speculative, intuitive, spiritual and mystical forms of knowledge. Rationality is the sword with which everything that does not submit to its logic is decapitated. But like a hydra, this only creates new faces, other 'irrationalities'. For example, there is a difference between credulity and spiritual thinking. There is a difference between intuition and gut feeling.

The Western way of thinking has relied too much on the rational mind. The dimensions of life, consciousness and spirituality are subordinated to it as projects 'yet to be enlightened'. It is now clear to me that the project of negative dialectics must go much further. It must open the doors to our other ways of being. However, I question whether negative dialectics is the appropriate means here, because in Adorno's work it withdraws into an aesthetic theory. It can accompany thinking a little way on the journey, but the path will quickly branch out.

But it is one of the paths that led me to the wisdom of ancient writings. This 'pre-modern' thinking is richer and more complex. It draws different boundaries. The focus is not on logic, but on consciousness, God, soul, nature, community, etc... These are concepts that are anchored on other levels of our existence. They are often intertwined. In the Vedas there are 7: matter, breath, spirit, ideal knowledge, bliss, consciousness and pure existence. When will we learn again that our humanity cannot be reduced to algorithms, do we really have to enter into a battle with AI first?

Sometimes I wonder if there is a parallel between the idea of the Big Bang and the appearance of the human spirit. For just as the Big Bang did not appear out of matter, but out of vibration, i.e. consciousness, the human spirit appeared as embedded in cosmic thinking, worlds of gods, honoring life. The cave paintings of Chauvet bear witness to this. And just as the material cosmos is moving towards cold death, the human spirit is differentiating itself into individual disciplines that forget about being human.

One possible answer to this fundamental crisis of the mind is Sri Aurobindo's integral philosophy: the synthesis of the yogas.

-

Here in Auroville, a play was recently taken off the program by the hosts of the Bharat Nivas. The reason given was that some in the community had taken offense even before it was performed. This raises questions. What is art allowed to do, when is a ban justified? Linked to this is, of course, the question of what is the role of art, i.e. what should art do? The question invites us to think about the role of art in general, here in India and in the West. And because this very fundamental question extends not only across the Indo-European region, but also covers a whole range of different cultures, I would also like to give it a temporal dimension.

Let's start at the beginning, e.g. with the Classical Greeks. On the one hand, there is the question of beauty (form, function, and/or proportion), but on the other hand there is also the question of the role of art within philosophy (techne, mimisis, aisthesis). At its core, this constellation of concepts is about the relationship of the subject to the outside world as an object. How do people perceive the world, how and why do we imitate the world, e.g. in the theater or in sculptures? What techniques, what tools do we use to shape the world, to give it a function, or to work out beautiful, i.e. mathematical proportions? In other words, it is about the relationship between man and his environment in a formative relationship.

Art is created, brought forth, is the expression of a subject that shapes the world of objects. In Western art, we see the artist and his vision. Despite all the rapid developments in European art history, this has not fundamentally changed to this day.

'Indian' art is quite different. Classical Indian art expresses feelings that are universal. Feelings of spirituality, human emotions, forces at work in the world. The artist is secondary to the work of art, actually unimportant, because only what is expressed in the work of art counts, because it is a reflection of the forces at work in the cosmos. The artist has merely made them visible. And this is where the misunderstanding arises that the art of India is largely similar to the art of the European Middle Ages, as there was no artist there like in antiquity or the Renaissance. What is the difference?

Textuality and interpretation

There is an important difference. The Western eye, or ear, the Western mind, looks for what can be interpreted in the work of art. This can be an intrinsic quality such as beauty, or a technical mastery, an iconographic reference, the genius of the artist, an object that is part of a discourse, an object of reflection, or quite 'simply' an image, a representation or a depiction. The list could go on and on. Essentially, however, it is always a question of interpretation. If a work of art is the subject of a differentiated interpretation, then it is considered a successful, great work of art. If it is an object that triggers a response, it is suspected of being 'mere' design, handicraft or kitsch.

In this way, the West has produced a cultural landscape based on interpretation. And interpretation is ultimately a critical analysis in the medium of language, i.e. it is textual. The encounter with art is one of reflection on art. Contemplation, which is also a recurring theme in Western discourses on art theory, is a preliminary stage of this reflection. Contemplation is reflected upon and expressed afterwards and thus robbed of its power.

The sublime

The aesthetic experience that eludes these discursive tendencies enters the realm of the sublime, the sublime, a realm of secular transcendence, i.e. the limits of language. For the limit of the textual is also part of the discourse, only as a demarcation and reference to the unspeakable. However, Western art theory usually leaves it at this reference. To continue talking about what cannot be said would be paradoxical. And so the viewer in the West goes to art temples, museums and galleries, churches and archaeological sites, urban places or nature in order to interpret what is presented there, or to fall silent before the unspeakable.

In traditions based on monotheistic religions, art therefore takes on the role of narrative, i.e. the story of the religion is told. The spiritual power of art is subject to an increasing process of abstraction. Art is becoming increasingly secular, materialistic, capitalistic, whereas religion is becoming increasingly strikingly transcendent. Religion refers to an afterlife where personal life finds a continuation. Of course, this hereafter cannot be experienced, cannot be expressed, but at the same time it is conceived as a reflection of our reality, albeit idealized.

There are therefore different forms of representations of reality. And so art is robbed of its power of wonder. It becomes a 'narrative culture', a culture of representation and the subject of various cultural techniques; it becomes part of the logos. Yet there is a clear desire to approach the unspeakable, the sublime. For this unspeakable does not elude experience, it just cannot be grasped by the rational mind. The problem lies in the fact that the rational mind follows the logic of a systematization of the world through the Logos. In the West, the idea prevails that the Logos can explain the world and that other ways of accessing the world are inferior to this Logos and must first be systematized by it: this applies, for example, to intuition, feeling, consciousness, the experience of the self and the experience of that which transcends the self. These phenomena are understood as unenlightened in Western culture. And so a desire for the sublime arises, which is demonized as unenlightened. Culture suppresses. For Freud, culture is sublimated sexuality. There is something in the description for the West.

Brahman

In Indian art, it seems to be the other way around. Indian art produces something that eludes language. Tradition speaks of rasa¹a vibration in perception that is often translated as taste, but not in the sense of a good taste in art, but in the sense of a quality that is evoked by a work of art. This vibration in the artwork creates a vibration in the viewer and connects the inner self of the viewer with the quality evoked in the artwork, which in turn is testimony to a force behind the superficial reality.

In Indian philosophy, the basic idea prevails that Brahman, the supreme being that encompasses everything, wants to experience itself. It is only for this reason that Brahman emerges from perfect existence and unfolds in the physical world. The cycle of the world, the world soul, the individual consciousness, the universal forces, all this is Brahman experiencing itself. Brahman is therefore inconceivable for us, we are part of Brahman, Brahman is within us, everything is Brahman. The role of art here is to represent some of these forces. Art makes the viewer wonder. A quality that is expressed in the work of art is captured as rasa. It cannot be expressed directly in language. The statue of a god is an expression of a quality, a force in the cosmos that has become tangible (tangible, palpable). The fact that the viewer and the artist evoke a rasa through the work of art means that this perception, the consciousness, the experience, the vibration of consciousness there is.

Existence

What does Dasein mean here? Existence should not be understood here in a dualistic sense, as if a quality in a work of art is perceived by a viewer and this quality is present in the work of art. Rather, existence here means that a force of the cosmos, a part of Brahman, has unfolded and become visible. Visible not in the sense that a viewer sees something in a work of art, but that a force shows itself in a work of art and evokes a rasa in the viewer that allows him to participate in the force. This is why the statues of the gods in India are animated. The gods are in them. When the powers are appeased through worship - puja - then they are there. Devotion to the universal principle is bhakti, it also defines an attitude in the relationship between the ritual object and the worshippers. The observer does not interpret or judge an external object, but the soul surrenders to the gods. This surrender is facilitated by a medium, a work of art.

In India, art is still part of the cosmic cycle, part of Brahman, it is animated, just as the whole cosmos is animated. Temples, statues, poems, dance, music are part of the cosmos, part of the cosmic forces, they are part of Brahman, and they enable the viewer to see aspects of Brahman more clearly, more vividly, more alive. Art means being able to wonder, to taste what is otherwise difficult to find - Rasa². Brahman is present in Indian art. The existence of art is the presence of cosmic forces, gods as they say here.

Back to the initial question: What is art allowed to do?

I now ask myself what these considerations mean for the freedom of expression in art? In the Western tradition, it is self-evident that the discursive nature of art not only allows for a culture of debate, but also generates and cultivates it. Criticism, disagreement, satire and censorship are part of the cultural industry, and exploring the boundaries is part of the practice. But what is the role of satire in Indian art, for example? What aspect of Brahman is realized here? Can't everything be shown? Even the gods laugh and cry, are angry or heroic.

I have a question here: in the West, art is often part of political culture. Politics is brought onto the stage and art intervenes in society and politics. In the 20th century, art was called upon to take its responsibility in society more seriously and to participate in political discourse. But does this also apply to art in India, a subcontinent torn by colonialism? India, with its many languages, cultures and religions, is such a colorful, tolerant country that feeds on a connection to spirituality in whatever form. To date, the world's largest democracy has largely granted freedom of expression. But when I talk to cultural representatives here, many point to the tradition of the role of art in promoting spiritual growth. Here in the country, I rarely hear that art has a political mission.

At the same time, however, many critical voices were heard at the Kochi Biennale, for example. Much of the art there took a very clear political stance on current issues such as the climate crisis, equal rights, the persecution of minorities, exploitation and corruption. I was very familiar with the artistic language of these positions, which was based on Western forms of expression.

These two worlds collide in India. The triumph of capitalism and its secular, i.e. materialistic structure does not stop at India. It remains to be seen whether the instruments of this culture industry will help to save the victims of this very culture industry. Traditionalists are trying to protect themselves from these colonial structures by rejecting modernity. This is perceived in the West as backward and conservative.

The culture war is also in full swing here in Auroville. If there is currently talk of a new global order in 2023, it is also about this culture war.

___

Exhibition "Roots From the Sky" by Cedric Bregnard at Centre d'Art, Auroville March 2023

Cedric Bregnard is Artist in Residence at the Centre d'Art in Auroville. He will be taking a photo of the Banyan tree in the Matrimandir garden over the next 2 months. This photo will then be scaled to the size of a wall (approx. 3x7m) in the gallery. Residents of Auroville are invited to trace light and shadow on the bark, leaves, roots, with ink on the wall. What lies behind this process is complex and touches on the essence of photography, the materiality of trees and the power of life. The tree itself is the geographical center of Auroville and represents a very special place for many people, a place of contemplation, concentration and meditation. For many, this tree is more than just a symbol of nature, man and the cosmos. It manifests something.

So what is it all about? Let's start with photography, because Cedric Bregnard is a photographer. In 1998, as the final project of his studies at the Ecole de Photographie de Vevey, Bregnard photographed the deceased. He took several months to accompany four people in a palliative clinic in Switzerland on their final journey. They consented to Cedric Bregnard taking a photo of them. After life had left the body, he took three hours alone with the deceased, a kind of wake, to then take exactly one photo, the only photo, of the body - a portrait. The arc that is drawn here is existential: What is the transition from life to death? What is a portrait? What can photography represent? What exactly happens when a photograph captures a moment - technically, temporally, metaphysically?

Photographs are technical images. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce took the first photograph in 1826. Louis Daguerre further developed the photochemical process to patent maturity in 1839, and it was the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière who invented the cinematograph in 1895. This device made it possible to both shoot and project films. The life-size moving image projections replaced the magic lantern and phantasmagoria.

In 1907, Henri Bergson criticized the cinematograph in his book Creative Evolution as an apparatus that produces illusory images. The sequence of individual images that create the illusion of movement is ultimately a lie. Plato argued similarly: painting is a lie, because you can't eat a painted apple. In 1985, Deleuze 'rescued' cinema from the accusation of lying by arguing that although the criticism was correct, it was short-sighted. The film strip contained more than just individual images, it was not the illusion of movement, but pure thought, was material philosophy. The cuts and collages allow for streams of thought that only film is capable of. Film is not 'truth 24 times a second' (Godard), but pure philosophy. The Elan Vital (Bergson), i.e. the life force that the cinematographer lacks, is expanded by the power of thought.

Latent images

Cedric Bregnard's performances implicitly relate to this discussion, albeit with a markedly different tone. After all, it is about how photography can transcend the technical image.

So let's go back to the beginning of photographic images. Light rays are captured using photochemical processes. A latent image is created, i.e. there is a light imprint in a chemical film on a carrier material. The latent image becomes visible when the transparent chemical compounds altered by the light are replaced by colored chemical compounds. With Daguerre, this was still silver on a glass plate. Kodak film, however, made working with negatives popular and inexpensive. The negatives could be enlarged efficiently in a large laboratory. We generally refer to these prints as photographs. So it is nature that 'paints' here, the light is captured with the help of an apparatus and made visible through chemistry. The photographer merely chooses the place, the time and the detail.

In Bregnard's process and his achievements, there is a very significant shift within this 'painting of nature'. He too chooses a place, the time and the detail - i.e. an object - specifically a tree - which he photographs with a camera. Instead of using a photochemical process, however, he uses a very high-resolution digital process. The pixels, which function somewhat like a latent image, are made visible by printing them on paper. The mathematical description of each pixel is transformed into a graphical representation using an algorithm and a printer. Most photographers who work digitally take these printouts as their final results. They are the equivalent of analog prints, i.e. photographs.

Making visible together

Bregnard works somewhat more finely. For him, the expressions are quasi negatives. An intermediate stage to the final image. The deduction of this negative is created in the performance. And this is where it gets a little magical.

The 'negative' that Bregnard prints is black and white without gray values. This means that every light reflex captured by the camera is set to either black or white, 'light or shadow'. This negative serves as the basis for the performance. Anyone can now take part and trace the traces of light and shadow. The image of the tree is collectively traced with ink. A nice detail here is that the ink is made from charcoal, which in turn is charred wood - a dead tree.

The collective tracing with ink itself is a process that Bregnard 'lets run'. He takes himself out of it. Again, it is nature that draws here. Nature in the sense of contrast to technology. But it is a higher form of nature, it is consciousness in the collective. The fact that this process is now taking place here in Auroville in relation to the Banyon tree is wonderful. That this is happening at a time when Auroville's driving force 'Diversity in Unity' is undergoing a test of strength may not be merely symbolic for some.

-

Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1911.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. 9th print. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

---. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

"Cedric Bregnard | Cedric Bregnard". Accessed February 10, 2023. https://www.cedricbregnard.ch/.

Art is fundamentally misunderstood, especially by experts, art historians and critics. Art is not about what it represents or what it means. Art is not a riddle to be deciphered, nor is it an expression of artistic genius that can be explained by the artist's biography. Art is also not necessarily beautiful, or aesthetic, or sublime.

Representation

Art is not Representationthat is the great misunderstanding of modernity. It was this misunderstanding that gave rise to the avant-garde. Its aim was to constantly invent new forms of representation, to express new phenomena for the first time. I am thinking of the subconscious, the concept of four-dimensional space, synaesthetic perception, functionalism, enthusiasm for technology. These and many other phenomena from the 20th century became the 'subject' of art. If something is the 'object' of art, then art represents this 'object', it depicts it - according to conventional art theory. The understanding of art on which this is based is one that is attached to the belief in progress, postulates an objective development of a history of art and is based on principles of rational historiography. All these approaches have a certain explanatory power within a limited framework. They shed light on certain aspects. However, they misunderstand the nature of art.

If I go so far out on a limb and attack the common art discourses of the West in one paragraph, I must of course also briefly say what I would like to counter. These are some essays by Roland Barthes, a great semiotician or semiologist and French art critic. His texts show the limits of what can be represented in art. And of course I am thinking of Gilles Deleuze, who thought much further and more radically and characterized art as an encounter. I associate him with a radical critique of the dogma of the representational theory of art. Art actually has nothing at all to do with representation. The idea that something stands for something else is actually absurd. It leads to all the problems of dualism, its paradoxes and illusory problems. A text, a picture, a composition, a play, an opera or a sculpture, even a photograph, they all represent nothing. Rather, they are very special things in the world that give us a very special experience. The fact that they are sometimes similar to other things is trivial and hardly interesting.

Encounter

When I say that art is an encounter, or makes it possible, it means that the artworks are the result of a creative process. The difference between the artist as the producer of works and the viewer as the recipient is much smaller than is generally assumed. Art is not an object of communication between artist and viewer. Nor is art a medium between a sender and a receiver. Nor is art a sign that can be decoded.

Art is art. Let's try not to immediately reduce it to something. Art is created and becomes part of the world. It has an effect, just like everything else in the world. There are very different modes of action, I am thinking here a little of Schopenhauer's fourfold root of the law of sufficient cause. I vary freely: there is mechanical causal effect, there is the dynamic of living, i.e. biological systems and there is social interaction as an effect, there is inspiration and creativity. Their modes of action are different. I would like to claim here that they are irreducible.

Art is art. It is produced and is part of a context. We can encounter it. Encountering art is not only reserved for humans. Some animals also have it, albeit to a limited extent, and perhaps artificial intelligence will also make progress in this area.

With Deleuze we learn that:

• the Cinematograph creates and plays a movie that manifests thought (Deleuze 'Cinema').
• Art for us is not only like is a house, but a house is. As humans, we stand between earth and heaven - the cosmos. In this tension, we need a boundary, a home. We need a territory that we call ours, and we need to be able to leave it, to deterritorialize and reterritorialize. Art has a very important role to play here. In the encounter with others, with the earth and the cosmos, we build a house, that is the basic principle of art. We inhabit the house, visit other houses. Of course, this is meant both literally and metaphorically (Deleuze 'What is Philosophy').
• When we encounter art, our senses merge with the art itself. Our eyes, ears, taste and touch vibrate when we come into contact with vibrating art (Deleuze 'Logic of Sensation').

What Deleuze avoids, and only hints at in his last essay 'Immanence: A life', is a spiritual component. Part of our being-in-the-world is our relationship to the great questions of meaning. A life that is aware of itself - if not fully, then richly - sees itself as part of a whole. This relationship also becomes a theme in art. We can encounter the power of creation. With Aurobindo, art has the ability, Bhakti i.e. to be a medium of devotion - an encounter with the divine - not in the form of a representation of the divine as in Christianity, but as an object of meditation that facilitates the path of bhakti in contemplative devotion.

I am interested in the relationship between Deleuze's concept of art as a house and Aurobindo's concept of art as bhakti in the temples. There seems to me to be a parallel here. Both lead from the dead end of representation to a concept that does more justice to spiritual experience.

Here is a link to a long Presentation (35MB) with material on the question of why I, as an art historian, read Deleuze.