New Spirits – Reading Deleuze in India
Consciousness exists only in connection with other consciousness
Observations on culture, community, society, everyday life, tradition, and social forms between Europe and India.
For many years now, my mind has been filled with emptiness most of the time. My memory is not good either, and I often repeat words or sentences in my mind without knowing why. Often they are simply experiences in a word on an endless loop, in a sense like a mantra. For a long time this worried me a great deal. I tried to find excuses and justifications for it. For example, that I had done a great deal…
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Schopenhauer, who was a great admirer of the Upanishads, wrote a small book, “On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason” (1847). He identifies four forms of causality, for example, small cause—large effect, or large cause—small effect, and so on… This fascinated me because it offers a broader understanding than the purely scientific model, which ultimately always follows the law of conservation of energy. When someone declares a war, for example, that is a relatively simple act (small…
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There was a time in Europe when people spoke of polymaths. In Germany, this would be Alexander von Humboldt, or Goethe; in France, an Enlightenment thinker; in Italy, the Renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci. In antiquity, Aristotle. Surely there are wise people in many cultures and epochs of whom history tells us that they knew everything one could have known at the time. Of course, that is nonsense. But this narrative serves a longing. We want to know everything, yet…
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Life is so complex, and there are so many different ways of living. There is no right or wrong life. Life is a gift. But what do you say about the negative energies, destruction and aggression, greed and resentment? All of that belongs to it. There is only acceptance. But acceptance does not mean approving of everything, nor tolerating everything. If a community decides to establish rules and sanction violations of these rules, that too is a form of acceptance.…
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Our brain is not the seat of our mind, but the medium through which we can reach the spiritual. When I first heard this many years ago at a conference on media theory, I was astonished. Did they really mean this seriously? Is it crazy or brilliant? There is this beautiful old-fashioned word, ‘subtle matter.’ Our body is a medium through which we can reach this. Our media theories generally have in common that they are conceived technically. There is…
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I live in a hypercomplex society. I notice this already in political and social issues, which nobody can really grasp in their complexity anymore. We can hold on to principles, such as justice, equality, freedom, consideration, sustainability, etc. But in concrete terms, things already become difficult. In a conflict, should I take one side or the other, or is there a third possibility? Which of my own ways of acting should I change, and how radically should I do so,…
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I am embarking on an experiment. A city is being built in Auroville. It is dedicated to humanity. It is about exploring consciousness, about spirituality and unity. UNESCO supports the project, the state of India, many people around the world. There is a charter, a plan, many plans, many opinions, progress and difficulties. Nobody is perfect… I am going there to help, and so I do not want to comment now, before arriving there. That would be entirely presumptuous. But…
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One of the most consequential misunderstandings of recent generations is the confusion of economic and political theory. There seems almost to be a consensus that capitalism is understood as a political theory. There may be many reasons why capitalism must be understood politically. There are certainly also reasons why capitalism is often thought together with democracy. For many people, they are the same thing anyway. Democracy without capitalism or capitalism without democracy seems unimaginable to many. It sounds synonymous. This…
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