Today, I finally went to the Matrimandir for the first time. Six years ago, I had a guided tour, which is a prerequisite for going alone later. It also makes sense to have a general idea of what kind of place it is, how to behave there, and what would disturb others. During my Monday meditations in Zen-Kreis Bremen, I was often drawn here. It was a place of peace and strength. Sometimes it seemed as if it wanted to tell me something. Well, it has...
Schopenhauer, 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, e.g., small cause – large effect, or large cause – small effect, etc. This fascinated me because it offers a broader understanding than the purely scientific model, which ultimately always follows the law of conservation of energy. For example, when someone declares a war, that is a relatively simple act (small cause) and...
I've always resisted the word meditation. Much about it seemed suspect to me. At the same time, I've always practiced my own forms of meditation without calling them that, or without having learned them. For me, meditation includes: a.) contemplation, i.e., sinking into a thought and consciously tracing thought impulses on a topic, circling around it until the mental image becomes clearer and appears before the inner eye. b.) focusing on…
Many films feature good hotels that are centrally located and where the political, intellectual, and economic elite gather. I've always perceived this as something very elitist, colonial, and power-hungry. What I missed in the films, and what was probably rarely addressed there, is the networking that takes place in such places. Now, the Center Guesthouse in Auroville is hardly comparable to a luxury hotel in a metropolis, although it is a very beautiful place that invites...
My perception changes when I arrive in India. The smell, the sounds, the slowness, the intuition, the acceptance, hope are wonderful things that I see. Others may see stench, noise, inefficiency, irrationality, and resignation, despair. I think it is this different perspective that allows me to feel comfortable in India. So I have had wonderful experiences. Thus I learned that different people have different perspectives on the same things. I learned by going from A to…
What should I take with me to India? I want to live a different life, in a different society, with different ideas and goals. It's warm there, life will be simple. Besides the basics like a few pieces of clothing, I need my tech gadgets like a laptop, phone, and camera. And what else? A good flashlight, because the dirt roads there are not lit. And books... There will be a number of libraries there too. I haven't had any ‚fun‘ for a very long time...
There was a time in Europe when people spoke of polymaths. In Germany, that would be Alexander von Humboldt or Goethe; in France, an Enlightenment thinker; in Italy, the Renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci. In antiquity, Aristotle. Certainly, in many cultures and eras, there have been wise people whom history tells us knew everything that could have been known at the time. This is nonsense, of course. But this narrative serves a longing. We want to know everything, but we have...
Black holes pose puzzles for us. I am not a cosmologist and approach black holes through popular science with a philosophical interest. They mark a boundary of our imagination. Gravity influences space and time, science says. Concentrated to a point, it condenses matter to its pure substance, crushing atomic nuclei and electrons together into a mass (atoms essentially consist of emptiness). This mass, with its incredible gravitational force, attracts everything and bends and distorts space and time. The black...
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