New Spirits – Reading Deleuze in India
Consciousness exists only in connection with other consciousness
Texts on the Upanishads, meditation, yoga, mantras, Brahman, Aurobindo, and spiritual practice in India.
Play — Misstep In the West, I used to think that play had to do with games, and that games had to do with rules. To play a game means to enter a space restricted by rules, and within those parameters the player can develop strategies in order to act according to the rules, with the aim of winning. There is the larger field of game theory, which has been applied to sociology and other disciplines; there are computer simulations…
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It is full moon in India. Time for self-reflection, meditation, and a turning inward. I have never really thought about death. For me, it was always a boundary, that which defines our existence negatively. Finitude throws us back upon ourselves, or so I thought. Here I agreed a little with Heidegger. To think of something beyond death always seemed arbitrary, naive, romantic, escapist, and credulous to me … Only in existential reflection did death seem meaningful to me. The dead…
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I woke from a nightmare at four in the morning. I was talking with Will in Apt about a strange disturbance in my perception of time. I described how time broke into fragments and some were simply missing. These were seconds or minutes, and while I tried to immerse myself in time to describe it better, everything went black. I cried for help, I was blind, and woke up. It was another of those dreams in which I seemed to…
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Sometimes meditation is quite simple and natural. I sit down, enter my body, become aware of my sensory apparatus and of how my consciousness and intellect engage with it, bring everything to rest, and higher consciousness shows itself, another kind of knowledge, space and time, another world of experience … Sometimes, though, it is difficult, and then I learn how meditation really works. I sit down; a chaos of thoughts and feelings spreads out. It takes a long time before…
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Many people have the idea that we live in a world made of matter, following the laws of physics and various theories, such as the theory of evolution. This is strange, for matter as such does not really exist; E=mc² stands for this. I do not really understand this formula, but it stands symbolically for everything ultimately being energy, possibly even simply vibration, as string theory claims. Then there is the physics of the macrocosm and the microcosm. They contradict…
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Outside my door there is soft red sandy ground. It is swept several times a week with a bundle of palm leaves and looks beautiful. I am still thinking about the same temple in Irumbai. Its history is becoming more and more complex, and so I am now immersing myself in Tantra philosophy. A few months ago I attended a workshop on it. We learned a small meditation exercise that I tried again today: Choose two objects and look at…
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Slowly, and at long intervals, I keep reading Sri Aurobindo. Why not read a lot and quickly, soak everything up and finally bring order to my world of thought, which wants to break out of the consequences of a rational monotheism? Why do I not give my intellect the freedom, concentration, quiet and strength to embark on one of life’s greatest adventures? As a student, I once went swimming in the Rhine, very naively, somewhere before Basel, where the water,…
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I am fascinated by the synchronicities here in Auroville. The spaces of thought, mind, spirit, body and emotion that intertwine here often do so over several days, seemingly effortlessly, intuitively, lightly. I was exhausted. A friend had left his body, as people say here. The community had provided support for over a month; many had grown closer. The death ceremony Karumadhi was held in a small circle, a particular kind of Puja on the 16th day, when the soul leaves…
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