Ramana, one of India's great enlightened beings, lived in Tiruvannamalai. At the core of his teachings is the concept of the Self: its emptiness and simultaneously immeasurable vastness. His teachings are simple; he does not follow a long tradition of interpretations. He was a simple man who meditated on the mountain and held satsangs. As a contemporary of Aurobindo, people listened to both and compared their radically different approaches. I am currently in Tiruvannamalai. I have attended some satsangs. I had a question in mind: How…
Traditional Indian music, the raga, is melodic with respect to a fundamental tone. Western music is harmonic, meaning simultaneous and complex. In the West, much is thought in terms of structures; for a time, there was much talk of structuralist and post-structuralist thought. Complex systems are found everywhere: in philosophy, in canonical texts and visual systems, in technology, and in worldviews. An essential fundamental idea is atomistic thinking. The notion is that the world consists of elementary parts and can be broken down into them...
My morning meditation is becoming a bit routine, though one can hardly say that after only a handful of times. It's more of a stretch, a path, or an exploration. Like hiking in the mountains: with the summit in sight, hiking through the paths, along the ridges, through the valleys and rivers, past the rock faces, through scree and rocks, meadows and forests, and beyond the tree line on the glaciers in the snow, the mountains become a metaphor for the inner search. The...
I woke up from a nightmare at 4 AM. I was talking to Will in Apt about a strange irritation in my perception of time. I described how time was fragmenting and some parts were simply missing. It was seconds or minutes, and as I tried to dive into the time to describe it better, it went black. I screamed for help, I was blind, and I woke up. It was one of those dreams where I seemed to die. Immediately...
I read Sri Aurobindo slowly and with long intervals. Why not read a lot and quickly, absorb everything, and finally bring order to my mental world, which wants to break free from the consequences of rational monotheism? Why don't I give my intellect the freedom, concentration, rest, and strength to embark on one of life's greatest adventures? As a student, I once swam very naively in the Rhine, somewhere near Basel, where the water was clear and cold, fast and broad green mountain landscapes…
Fate, karma, causality, laws of nature, determinism – these are all different expressions of the idea that the universe follows a predictable logic. They imply that what has happened has logically arisen from what preceded it, and that the present is likewise determined by the past. We consider this logic to be reasonable and rational, logically sound. Yet, when we assume that the future is equally determined by the present and the past, we dismiss it as superstition, irrationality, or unscientific. We resist it…
For several weeks, I've been living with a neurotic dog. She used to bark a lot as long as she perceived me as a stranger. She kept her distance, she was scared. After a few weeks, she accepted me, she approaches and wants to be petted. Now she lies in front of my door and keeps watch; she protects me. What happened? I haven't changed my attitude towards her. I have little connection to dogs and don't pay much attention to her. I'm relatively indifferent. With her...
(this is an old text of mine, found in the archives. It is strange to read it again, as it shows to me how desperately I tried to get out of the trap of representation and the urge to embrace a philosophy of immanence. I went through so many ideas, looked at so many artists – I never did anything with the text, as my self-critical voice didn’t consider it to be any good. I have to say I like...
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