The contrast could hardly be greater: Auroville is flat, hot on the coast, and it wants to be a city, based on the teachings of Mirra Alfassa and Sri Aurobindo. At their core, their visions are based on the idea of bringing divine consciousness to Earth, a „download“ of the Supramental. Some seem to be able to claim access to it. And sometimes I feel like I understand what they're talking about. The experience of deep spirituality in meditation, in work, in being...
I am in a sesshin, a 2.5-day short form of intensive Zen meditation. Thoughts and images about the artificial general intelligence (AGI) that we are currently creating keep coming to me. More and more people from the fields of humanities, psychology, or team organization are showing themselves to be impressed, surprised, or anxious regarding AGI's capabilities. It seems the Turing test was passed some time ago, and we are now watching an intelligence develop that seems superior to us. This intelligence...
Form is emptiness. It has shape, but no substance; it is neither matter nor energy. Form is consciousness – to see something as something gives rise to form. Form is also functional: substance, matter, and energy interact according to laws. As part of consciousness, they interact in form. Form is emptiness. Form is consciousness. Consciousness interacts with consciousness. Matter arises from form – not the other way around. Matter does not give rise to form. The flow of energy and matter – from individual…
When I began reading the Upanishads, I realized that the inner path I had embarked upon was leading me into an extraordinarily beautiful inner landscape. Discovering that this inner landscape is connected to cosmic consciousness made me aware of the important work I must undertake—what people often call “inner work.” As I committed myself to this inner work, I focused on how I was feeling, who I am, and what I must face. What are my shadows? My insecurities? My…
During the Chola Empire, the layout of Shiva temples was highly formalized. Based on the Agamas and Shastras, the temple was fully developed into a place in space, time, and consciousness where the microcosm and macrocosm mirror each other. When a temple is built, a site will be chosen, and it has to be indicated as auspicious. Often an unusually friendly encounter with the animal realm is considered a good sign. The site then has to be…
The snake in paradise seduced Eve into eating a fruit from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, which distinguishes between good and evil. Why was the Tree of Knowledge forbidden? Why did the snake seduce Eve? What did the fruit taste like? When I asked myself why I wanted to talk about this, I felt like Eve standing before the tree, talking to a snake who was trying to seduce me into eating the fruit. Do...
It's a full moon in India. Time for self-reflection, meditation, and inner contemplation. I've actually never really thought about death. It always seemed like a boundary to me, the thing that defines our existence negatively. Finitude throws us back on ourselves, or so I thought. I agreed a little with Heidegger here. Thinking about something beyond death always seemed arbitrary, naive, romantic, escapist, and gullible to me... Only in existential reflection did it seem meaningful to me. The dead...
In Western analytical-modern theories of consciousness, that is, those that consider themselves empirically scientific, a correlation between matter and consciousness is always assumed. This is relatively uncontroversial in itself, as virtually all frameworks proceed from this assumption. Birth and death mark the endpoints of this correlation. The question then arises: What does this correlation look like? Does consciousness determine matter, or does matter determine consciousness, or is it an interaction? 3 variants of the relation between consciousness and matter The first…
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