We do, after all, live only in the moment. Often this sounds like an accusation. You should not live only in the moment; think of the future, be conscious of your responsibility. In many modern societies, living in the moment is considered a kind of dreaminess: unproductive and escapist. For those who have time — beyond mere survival in a capitalist, socialist, or otherwise organized economy — to set aside some time for themselves, the great driving force seems to…
I come by way of the roads of Western thought. Since Roman times they have been well paved; they connect centers of power and have established a logic of knowledge exchange all their own. They connect points. Their nodes are central, while the path itself is bothersome, laborious. On these roads, a culture of monuments developed; they led to accumulations of knowledge and power. Division of labor led to specialization and progress. A society emerges in which the individual is…
Karl Marx and Charles Darwin shaped the worldview of the twentieth century. But in India a movement emerged that freed itself from colonial shackles and revived the wisdom of Indian philosophy.
Discover the spiritual power of the Upanishads and the Rigveda in India. Experience the beholding of essence and the pure form of the senses in meditation.
Recently a friend asked me about the relationship between Eastern and Western culture. Of course that is an enormous question, one I also ask myself and one that, of course, no one can really answer. But I want to formulate a few thoughts: Distance From an Imagined Center Facing the ‘Western’ world, based on classical antiquity, Christianity, the Enlightenment and materialism, is the Occidental world of the Assyrians and Persians, of Islam and the conception of a divinely guided polity.…
I am approaching Sanskrit very slowly. On Thursdays, Nishtha holds a seminar on the Rigveda. Reciting together in Sanskrit, the detailed analysis of the translation, Nishtha’s philological considerations and the explanations of the psychology of the gods open a way into these ‘sacred’ texts. I remember my study of Latin, the Indo-European roots, the sounds that reverberate in the ragas, phonetics as a declaration of existence, language as sound and vibration, communication as rhythm. The breath of life, yoga, vitality,…
For very many years I have known that I want to practice ‘yoga’, but I have never done it. As with meditation, I did not feel ready for it, or was put off by Western esoteric forms that ultimately understand both meditation and yoga as self-optimization. Meditation and yoga are philosophical, spiritual and ultimately transcending practices for overcoming one’s own Self, opening oneself to a greater consciousness. All this seems so clear now. My “study” of Indian philosophy is slowly…
The Solitude Farm in Auroville is a ‘food forest’. This is one of the few English terms that is difficult to express in German through a compound word (Esswald?). We do not have such a thing, and find it difficult to think about it too. An orchard that we would allow to grow wild with other edible annual plants and shorter-lived plants until we had a dense jungle consisting entirely of edible plants… I am looking for a word for…
