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.
Curry! Every morning there are wonderful, mildly spiced Indian dishes. They are light and complex; there seem to be 1,001 spices in them. At midday, Solarkitchen, the community canteen: simple, vegetarian, good. The principle is healthy food for everyone; everyone can afford it. In the evening, these wonderful dishes again. What there is not: alcohol, meat or fish, sugar. Eggs are a luxury. In Germany I ate a lot of chocolate; now it is much too sweet for me. I…
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For three weeks now I have been reading in India: Deleuze, Upanishads, Sri Aurobindo. In between I sometimes meditate. The rest is still a remnant of everyday life in the New World. Reading the news, consuming entertainment media, organizing things that have no real significance here but need continuity so that they do not fall apart in old Europe and the New World. Reading, then… It seems to me that I have spent decades preparing to read here. My thinking…
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Today I went to a choir session. What happened there was a very intense shared experience. I will try to describe it as objectively as possible. We (about sixty participants) began with breathing exercises, ‘warmed up’ the vocal cords, sounded four-part chords and moved through pitches. The choir director pointed out that we were not here by chance. We were in Auroville because something had drawn us here. I think most people in the room understood what he meant; for…
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I recently met a young Indian man here. He comes from Delhi, and for him South India is also a foreign world, though not as foreign as it is for me. He does not speak Tamil and is also somewhat more composed, or enlightened, in his spirituality, as one might perhaps say. I met him again on the street, and we went to the afternoon school Thamarai on the edge of Auroville, which offers an afternoon program in a village…
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Today I was in the Matrimandir for the first time. Six years ago I took a guided tour; that is a prerequisite for going there alone later. It also makes sense to have a rough orientation as to what kind of place it is, how to behave there, what would disturb others. During my Monday meditations in the Zen circle in Bremen, I was often carried here. It was a place of peace and strength. Sometimes it seemed as though…
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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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I have always resisted the word meditation. Much about it was suspect to me. Yet at the same time I have always practiced my own forms of meditation, without calling them that, or without having learned them. For me, the realm of meditation includes: a) contemplation, that is, sinking into a thought and deliberately tracing impulses of thought on a subject, circling until the mental image becomes clearer and appears before the inner eye. b) Paying attention to one’s own…
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Many films feature good hotels in central locations where the political, intellectual, and economic elite meet. I always perceived this as something very elitist, colonial, and power-hungry. What escaped me in the films, and probably was rarely their subject either, is the networking that takes place in such places. Now, the Center Guesthouse in Auroville can hardly be compared to a luxury hotel in a metropolis, although it is a very beautiful place, welcoming, friendly, and making life easy. Rather,…
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